Poem of the day
For Once, Then, Something
Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Robert Frost
Others taught me with having knelt at well-curbs
Always wrong to the light, so never seeing
Deeper down in the well than where the water
Gives me back in a shining surface picture
Me myself in the summer heaven godlike
Looking out of a wreath of fern and cloud puffs.
Once, when trying with chin against a well-curb,
I discerned, as I thought, beyond the picture,
Through the picture, a something white, uncertain,
Something more of the depths--and then I lost it.
Water came to rebuke the too clear water.
One drop fell from a fern, and lo, a ripple
Shook whatever it was lay there at bottom,
Blurred it, blotted it out. What was that whiteness?
Truth? A pebble of quartz? For once, then, something.
Robert Frost
posted by Libby Spencer at 1:36 PM
4 Comments:
lovely
I've always like Frost since I was child and received "A Child's Garden of Verse" or something along those lines.
This is a lovely poem, and it reminds me of the adage about not seeing the forest through the trees. Was that Frost too?
I love Frost. I don't know about that adage particularly Kathy. I have a terrible memory for that sort of thing. He does a lot of forest poems though.
Ha-ha. I have a bad memory too. I woke up in the middle of the night and realized the book I mentioned above was written by Robert Louis Stevenson, not Frost. Groan...I hate getting old.
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