Once by the Pacific

“Once by the Pacific” features imagery drawn from the ocean and the shore, including water, clouds, and cliffs. The scene is, on one level, literal: Frost paints a rich, sensory experience. Waves pound the beach; clouds roll in from the sea. Frost enriches these features with a plentiful use of adjectives: The water is “shattered” (Line 1) and the waves are “great” (Line 2), for example.

On a second, deeper level, Frost personifies his landscape. He attributes human qualities to natural phenomena. The clouds have faces and hair (Lines 5-6); the night has “dark intent” (Line 10). These objects take on human, malevolent qualities which they do not possess in a literal sense.

Although the overall picture is of an approaching catastrophic event, the speaker never describes the disaster in a definite way. The waves consider “doing something” (Line 3) to the shore, but what they have in mind is not specified, other than their actions being unprecedented. In Line 13, the speaker promises that “more than ocean-water [will be] broken” before the disaster ends, though again, he is sketchy on the details.

The speaker's uncertainty also appears in his conversational or informal