Once by the Pacific

“Once by the Pacific” is a sonnet by Robert Frost, one of the most renowned and popular American poets of the twentieth century. Frost first published it in the American magazine The New Republic in December 1926 and reprinted it in his collection West-Running Brook in 1928. The poem records an incident from Frost’s early childhood. While walking with his parents on San Francisco’s Ocean Beach during a gathering storm, he found himself alone for a little while and felt frightened. The poem depicts the incoming waves as a malevolent force threatening to overwhelm the land and destroy of the entire world. This depiction of nature as hostile and threatening is darker than Frost's other poems about the natural world, but, as the title indicates, the poet here recalls a traumatic incident in the past (“once”) rather than espousing his general view of the world.

Frost's preference for traditional forms (in this case, the sonnet) over free verse is a hallmark of his poetic voice. Acknowledging free verse's immense popularity with his contemporaries, Frost famously said that he would “as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down” (quoted in Hoffman, Tyler B.