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.
Themes
Destruction of the Natural Order
Although many of Frost’s poems have warm and cozy associations in popular culture, others take a rather bleak view of the universe. Frost was a religious man, but he was skeptical about God's intentions and His role in the universe. In his 1922 poem “Design,” for example, Frost throws doubt on the assumption that everything in creation reflects the careful design of a benevolent and omniscient God.
There is, however, no parallel elsewhere in Frost’s oeuvre for the furious assault on the order and beauty of creation he offers in “Once by the Pacific.” Whatever energy normally holds the cosmos in balance is, in this poem, utterly overthrown. A malignant, chaotic force upends the peaceful coexistence of earth and water, and Frost provides no meaningful insight into its motivations. This is much more than a stormy night on the sea; the water is the harbinger of universal destruction. This recalls a Biblical episode from the Book of Genesis, where God drowns almost all of Earth's creatures (except for Noah and those on his ark) in a world-engulfing flood.
God and the Apocalypse
In the last two lines of the poem, the speaker warns of untold destruction “Before God’s last Put out the Light is spoken” (Line 14). This unexpected invocation of God, who has not been mentioned up to this point, widens the poem's frame of reference. This storm is not just a natural disaster caused by some rogue impulse of the ocean; now, the story has a metaphysical and religious dimension. The chaos at hand will end only when God intervenes, but His intervention will not reestablish order: It will destroy creation altogether. It is as if God will confirm the devastating extent of the destruction by annihilating his own creation—for what could continue to exist, if universal darkness enveloped the earth?
There are two rationalizations for God's decision to "Put out the Light" (Line 14). First, He might be unable to repair the destruction caused by the water, implying that He is not omnipotent. Second, and perhaps more likely: He may have permitted or even instigated the storm. This vision of a God who “put[s] out the Light” is difficult to reconcile with the benevolent being who upholds creation according to His laws, but in Judeo-Christian religious belief, God is both Alpha and Omega: Beginning and End. As He created the universe, so He will, eventually, unmake it. His command to “Put out the Light” here is thus an inversion of the passage in Genesis in which He creates the world: “And God said, Let there be light” (Gen. 1.3).
The theme of earth and water is prominent in these early lines of Genesis, too. At Genesis 1:9, God separates the seas from the land as one of the first phases of creation. In “Once by the Pacific,” He erases that primordial distinction: The boundaries between sea and land are once again unclear. In Genesis, God looked at His creation and “saw that it was good” (Genesis 1:12)—in “Once by the Pacific,” God seems to withdraw His approval. In a reenactment of the Noah story, God destroys His own creation when He deems it appropriate.
Childhood Fears
Frost repeatedly attributed the inspiration for “Once by the Pacific” to a terrifying childhood incident. As a small boy, he became separated from his parents as a storm brewed on the sea. Interpreted through this lens, the poem expresses the confusion, chaos, and fear felt by an abandoned child. Childhood has a way of amplifying minor incidents: An adult might write off the entire affair, but children lack the tools to contextualize a frightening event. Frost uses uncertain language to emphasize the speaker's confusion: The angry water intends to do “something” (Line 3) to the shore, though what, he cannot say.
While the fury of nature was real in a literal sense, the sea's malevolent intentions also reflect a child's mental state at a moment of extreme terror. Without the comfort and support of his parents, the speaker's internal, emotional landscape mirrors the chaotic scene on the beach. Frost uses a similar device in another poem, “Desert Places” (1933), in which the bleakness of the winter scene reflects the loneliness in the speaker’s heart.
The poem may also allude to difficult familial dynamics. Distressed children in intense situations sometimes feel culpable somehow; they believe they must have done something wrong for such a situation to arise. One reading of a rather curious line, “Someone had better be prepared for rage” (Line 12), suggests that the speaker (that is, the young Frost) was frightened of his father's wrath. Frost's biographer, Jay Parini, has brought attention to this in the context of “Once by the Ocean.” As Parini writes, “The rage discovered in the natural world […] was not unlike the rage often found in Will Frost [Robert Frost's father], who might well erupt before the household lamps were finally extinguished on any given night” (Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York, Henry Holt, 1999, p. 14). In a similar vein, the phrase “Put out the Light” (Line 14)—ostensibly a command from God to end all of creation—also sounds like a late-night order from a frustrated mother to her child.
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By Robert Frost
