19 pages • 38 minutes read
Robert FrostOnce by the Pacific
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1928A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Oceanic Landscape
“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.
Uncertainty
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 tone. In Line 7, the phrase “You could not tell,” for example, begins with an indefinite pronoun; the “you” is not identified. The repeated phrase “It looked as if” (Lines 7 and 9) is another imprecise description. The speaker uses distancing language, refusing to vouch for the veracity of what he perceives. Finally, Line 12 also features an indefinite pronoun or nonspecific subject: “Someone had better be prepared for rage.” This might be an ironic understatement (also known by the Greek word meiosis) since, given the scale of the coming destruction, the notion that “someone” should prepare seems inadequate, to say the least. It does, however, contribute to the speaker's lack of certainty that runs throughout the poem.
The Light
While the phrase “Put out the Light” in Line 14 is an ironic reversal of God’s creation of light in the Book of Genesis, it may also allude to another canonical text of western literature. In William Shakespeare’s 1603 tragedy Othello, Othello says the same thing. Believing that his wife, Desdemona, has been unfaithful to him, he enters her chamber at night to murder her. Holding a candle, he addresses the audience in a soliloquy. “Put out the light,” he says, “And then put out the light” (Act V, Scene 2, Line 7), referring first to snuffing the candle, then to “snuffing out” Desdemona's life. The first, Othello states, can be reversed if he chooses; he could relight the candle. The second, however, cannot: He cannot bring Desdemona back from the dead. Frost may echo this connection Shakespeare established between “putting out the light” and ending human life in “Once by the Pacific.”
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