Once by the Pacific

The concept for the poem originated from a traumatic incident in Frost’s early childhood, when he was five or six years old. As an adult, Frost shared the story with several people. Although the versions differ slightly in their details, the core narrative is consistent. Here, Frost recounts what happened to his friend, Louis Mertins:

I was very small and impressionable—a child full of imagination and phobias. I watched the big waves coming in, blown by the wind. I recall that I was playing on the sand with a long black seaweed, using it for a whip. The sky must have clouded up, and night began to come on. The sea seemed to rise up and threaten me. I got scared, imagining that my mother and father, who were somewhere about, had gone away and left me by myself in danger of my life. I was all alone with the ocean water rising higher and higher. I was fascinated and terrorized watching the sea; for it came to me that we were all doomed to be engulfed and swept away. Long years after I remembered the occasion vividly, the feeling which overwhelmed me, and wrote my poem, “Once by the Pacific” (Quoted in Holland, Norman N. The Brain of Robert Frost: A Cognitive Approach to Literature. New York: Routledge, 1988, p. 19).

Frost’s biographer Lawrance Thompson provides more details from an interview with the poet. The Frost family had just dined at the Cliff House, a nearby restaurant overlooking the Pacific. They went down to the beach and walked along the shore as dusk fell. As the young Frost played with the seaweed, he

unintentionally dropped so far behind the others that they passed out of sight beyond outcroppings of rock and ledge. When at last the boy turned to look for them and realized that he was alone under the cliff, he was frightened. The roar of the waves seemed hostile. The towering wall of rock leaned out and threatened. Dark clouds reached down with crooked hands. Overwhelmed with terror, he ran and kept running until he overtook his parents (ibid, pp. 22-23).

Frost had other traumatic encounters with the ocean; when his father went swimming in the San Francisco Bay, for example, he left the young Frost alone on the beach to guard his belongings. As Frost told the American academic Peter J. Stanlis, when “he was left alone on the beach, he was in a terrible state of agitation until his father returned” (quoted in Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. New York, Henry Holt, 1999, p. 14). In 1931, Frost returned to Ocean Beach; it stirred deep and uncomfortable memories for him. “You probably shouldn’t go back to places you knew when you were younger,” he later said after a reading of “Once by the Pacific.” “It brings on trouble, strange thoughts, dreams” (ibid., p. 276).

As evidenced by these and other accounts, Frost was not shy about sharing the origins of “Once by the Pacific.” For him, the ocean was a site of primal terror. The episode on Ocean Beach made such a strong impression on the poet that he remembered it decades later, crystalizing a moment of childhood anxiety in a poem about mounting tension and dread.