A Good Beginning: "Once By The Pacific"

I think that recalling Robert Frost's "Once By the Pacific" would be an appropriate gesture for this initial posting. I keep wondering where on the west coast Frost was visiting from New England. I keep thinking I should research that question. Then, I reread the poem, speak it aloud, and I find myself at the shore, wet with spray, and grinning, helplessly and heedlessly, despite the palpable rage in Frost's vision.


Once By the Pacific

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.

---Robert Frost (1928)