For Once, Then Something Poem By Robert Frost

For Once, Then Something

      -  By 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.