"For Once, Then, Something"
Three more “pebble” poems
Last week, I wrote a brief post about the poem, “In the middle of the road” by Brazilian poet Carlos Drummond de Andrade. It got me thinking about the image of the “stone” or “pebble” in literature, a topic that could fill volumes. But a handful of related poems immediately came to mind and coalesced there, which has led me to this somewhat longer exploration. I narrowed my focus: of all the poems in the world that feature a “quartz pebble” (millions, surely), three remain in particular kinship in my imagination. The first is Robert Frost’s 1923 poem, “For Once, Then, Something,” a hendecasyllabic piece in fifteen lines whose ending clause is also its title:
For Once, Then, Something Others taunt 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.
What begins with the classical image of Narcissus admiring himself in the water despite the snickering of others (a dichotomy which puts external and self-perception at great odds), becomes a meditation on perception itself. Once, Frost writes with emphasis, only once, when the “too clear” mirror-surface of the water is disturbed, the speaker is able to see “deeper down in the well” and catch a glimpse of something he could not before.
The first oddness of this poem occurs when you realize that the speaker comes into perception of this deep-thing only when the water is stirred, “blurring” and “blotting out” the image of the object that “lay there at the bottom.” What, to us, might seem like an obscuring effect is actually a clarifying one. Before this interruption, the speaker was, perhaps, too distracted by his own picture. The ripple effect on the surface of the water appears to have “shook whatever it was,” an optical illusion that draws the speaker’s eye toward the object.
The second strangeness of the poem is that this moment of perception is snatched away almost as soon as it is granted. “What was that whiteness?” the speaker asks, as the water, we assume, settles back into placidity. He cannot reckon whether this image is something mundane, a “a pebble of quartz,” or an omen of “truth.” With its titular repetition of “For once, then, something,” the speaker acknowledges that it doesn’t matter what he witnessed, but that it was something.
Perhaps this poem provides an alternative ending to the Narcissus myth, one in which the beautiful hunter’s worst impulses are intervened against, and he has a chance of surviving his egoism. Superficial perception is replaced by “deeper” perception.
The second quartz pebble poem I love is a long, sequenced piece from 1965 by Serbian poet of Romanian descent, Vasko Popa. The translation I know is by Anne Pennington, which first appeared, as far as I can discern, in Modern Poetry in Translation, No 1, but Popa’s poems have also been famously translated by the poet Charles Simic (who also has a wonderful poem about a stone). Because of its length, I have posted only the first two sections here, as well as the epigraph (which, having been penned by the author, serves as a kind of foreword or “section i.”) You can read the whole poem here.
The Quartz Pebble for Dušan Radić Headless limbless It appears With the excitable pulse of chance It moves With the shameless march of time It holds all In its passionate Internal embrace A smooth white innocent torso It smiles with the eyebrow of the moon 1. The Heart of the Quartz Pebble They played with the pebble The stone like any other stone Played with them as if it had no heart They got angry with the pebble Smashed it in the grass Puzzled they saw its heart They opened the pebble’s heart In the heart a snake A sleeping coil without dreams They roused the snake The snake shot up into the heights They ran off far away They looked from afar The snake coiled round the horizon Swallowed it like an egg They came back to the place of their game No trace of snake or grass or bits of pebble Nothing anywhere far around They looked at each other they smiled And they winked at each other 2. The Dream of the Quartz Pebble A hand appeared out of the earth Flung the pebble into the air Where is the pebble It hasn’t come back to earth It hasn’t climbed up to heaven What’s become of the pebble Have the heights devoured it Has it turned into a bird Here is the pebble Stubborn it has stayed in itself Not in heaven nor in earth It obeys itself Amongst the worlds a world
In this poem, the pebble is a shifting image. Several wildly different theses could be written by tracing the meaning and significance of transformation across its many sections, and doing so, many times over, is the delight of reading it. The pebble not only comes to signify a discrete universe of signs but becomes that universe of signs. But what I want to emphasize is the poem’s meta-narrative about imagery in poetry. The pebble, as a primordial image, demonstrates the nearly infinite capacity of the image to connote. It is a metaphor, of course, but its referent is constantly changing. Like Narcissus experiences in Frost’s poem, just when we catch a glimpse of the quartz pebble, it is gone.
In doing research for this post, I found that in early 2023, the poet Aakriti Kuntal discussed this poem on the Substack, Poetly, where they made the following brilliant observation:
“The metaphor is not just a metaphor for it doesn’t map to a single, fixed meaning but rather revolves around a map of associations. This takes into account the material aspects of a pebble but shapes it into metaphysical properties. Hence, an entity is born.”
Indeed, as the pebble transforms and transforms, its original material and metaphysical qualities are abandoned, then reanimated, then newly abandoned, then newly reanimated. I would argue that the “entity” that is born is also continually killed and reborn.
I was first introduced to this poem (and this poet) when I was writing a series of essays for The Hopkins Review about “homage” poems, their myriad forms and functions. I made a post on Twitter asking poets to share with me their own, or their favorite, homage poems. Ariel N. Banayan (on Twitter/X here) replied with his poem, “Ancestor of the Toilet,” published in Volume 10 (2020) of Foothill Poetry Journal, stating that he had written it as an homage poem to the Popa’s “The Quartz Pebble.” This mode of homage is one of extension and continuation—borrowing an image from a source poem and giving it new life, connect, and connotation in the homage:
Ancestor of the Toilet
In the garden of Eden
Eve sits by a river
Watching the water
The Sun trickles on skin
Water moving like any other water
A foot stirs in its silent motion
The wet touch a new song
A smooth yet cold persuasion
A white pebble
Floats down the river
No heavy splash or flailing limbs
Just humming for the Moon
And nobody else
Eve turns her chin away
Eyes shut
Imagines a dimmer Sun
A wordless feeling passes through
Her virgin body
And merely trickles away
The warmer river slips
Near a tree in the distance—
Bark stained with her new yellow
A subtle sheen of borrowed Sun
Eve smiles
Whispers a poem for the river
In a language we have long forgotten
The waters pause
The whiteness of the pebble
Sinks—
The Moon is the dullest mirror of the universe
True clarity lies in tainted waterI was taken by this poem, both because of its lovely, subtle echoes of Popa’s voice and style and because of its cheeky take on the subject matter. It feels like a section of “The Quartz Pebble” that exists in an alternate universe, but its perversity, which is especially highlighted by its title, makes it entirely new. I reached out to Banayan to inquire about this project, and he very kindly explained how, when, and where it began, namely, in 2020, with the Charles Simic translations of Vasko Popa’s poems published by NYRB Poets in 2019:
“With the pandemic going on and so much uncertainty in the world, I actually had a panic attack earlier that summer, and rushed to the bathroom to just experience all white tiles and calmness. Coincidentally, earlier that week, I placed the NYRB on the counter near my sink for some reason. As I was cooling off all the volcanic emotions, I picked it up and just started to read the first few poems, searching for a sense of comfort and order and catharsis.
I wouldn’t consider what I had to be an epiphany. I more or less felt an experience of unity, where everything that didn’t make sense suddenly seemed okay and in line. […] I especially felt how the lack of punctuation and the presentation of physical objects all denied a certain logic inherent to that object itself, all of which had been present and connected to the anxiety of the pandemic. […]
It became a ritual for me. I’d read Popa in the bathroom, letting my mind unwind and really soften in a way that I think is the purpose of that kind of surrealist writing. And as a little fun exercise, I began writing similar style poems about toilets while in that space just to explore more of that mindset. I thought it was such a funny, unpoetic topic that really opened up a wormhole of thoughts and questions involving all sorts of toilet topics. […]
I asked myself about the logic (and lack of logic) with certain myths and ideas involving plumbing systems and whatnot. Did Milton ever mention how Adam and Eve found a restroom in the garden of Eden? Did Borges ever mention the plumbing system in the Library of Babel? I didn’t know and thought it was entertaining and fun to explore and research with the playful ethos of Popa himself.”
Indeed, a sense of calm pervades Banayan’s poem; it feels like a moment removed from time, just as a moment of collecting one’s emotions in a cool, white, clean bathroom might be. But a moment out of time cannot hang suspended on air; it is also an interruption, which, of course, brings us back to the Frost poem and his “quartz pebble” at the bottom of Narcissus’s well. A Narcissian figure herself, Banayan’s “Eve” “sits by the river / Watching the water.” When “A white pebble / Floats down the river” and into her field of vision, “A wordless feeling passes through / Her.”
I see this “white pebble” as Popa’s, it having floated off his page and into the collective unconscious, as it does many times in “The Quartz Pebble,” and into Banayan’s poem, ready to take on a new set of transformations. Eve, as does the speaker in Frost’s poem, recognizes something “true” in the pebble’s interruption, in its “tainted water,” that which is “blurred,” “blotted out” (Frost), something “wordless” and unsayable but significant. It is something like recognition. And then it is gone: “The waters pause / The whiteness of the pebble / Sinks—” It sinks into the next universe, ready to be glimpsed again someday. Or it is gone forever.
Excellent!