What mystery pervades a well!

Originally, this poem was left untitled—using the first line as the title is a long-time poetry convention. Therefore, it is best to examine the poem without the title for the contained sense of balance it carries as six freestanding stanzas. The first line is completely self-contained—it ends in an exclamation mark, finishing the thought rather than carrying it over to the next line. This use of simple, straightforward language and closing punctuation causes the line to act as a thesis statement for the rest of the poem. Every image that follows is in support of the idea that even a small, enclosed space like a well holds unknowable and possibly unfathomable depths.

The first stanza introduces the theme of mystery in an intimate, jovial tone. The water is described as a “neighbor” (Line 3), and the well is shrunk into a “jar” (Line 4). This perspective builds a personal relationship between the speaker and the well, one that is reinforced in the second stanza, when the speaker is identified through the pronoun “I” while the well is personified as “he.”

The coziness of this tete-a-tete between neighbors is a powerful contrast to the darker, more atmospheric imagery to come. Peering into the well’s depths offers an “abyss” (Line 8). This word choice marks a shift in tone away from the familiar and into the more gothic and introspective. This line is also the most jarring deviation from the standardized rhyme scheme (glass/face), which draws the reader’s attention to the change.

The speaker brings a third character into the scene: the grass that grows at the well’s side, also given a masculine pronoun. This becomes the second instance of personification. The speaker reflects that like the well, the grass only exposes its surface to the world, and the speaker does not pretend to know the grass’s true heart: Using hedging verbs to emphasize the grass’s internal mystery, the speaker opines that “The grass does not appear afraid” (Line 9) and “looks[s] so bold” (Line 11).

After establishing the relationship between the grass and the well, the speaker broadens the parallel. In the fourth stanza, the relationship between grass and well is likened to that of the sea and the wild sedge grass that grows alongside it. The sedge is fundamentally less safe than the domestic grass of the homestead; unlike the well, which is a contained and domesticated bit of nature, the sea has whims of its own and could potentially inflict real harm. The sea encroaches on the landscape, weakening the ground the sedge stands on, and yet the sedge grass “does no timidity betray” (Line 16). This line again puts the speaker’s focus on appearances. They do not try to tell us how the sedge is feeling, but rather what they project. This brings to the reader’s mind a connection to soldiers and warfare, and how a man may venture onto unsteady ground without showing fear.

When the speaker turns to nature itself, the pronouns shift to the feminine. Here the poem becomes less concrete and more thought-provoking as the speaker considers the world’s attitude towards the unknown: “nature is a stranger” (Line 17), and those who claim to understand or connect with her are often the ones who are the most removed from her. Their casual and self-assured ownership of nature betray their ignorance and shallow understanding of what for the speaker is too awe-inducing to easily reference.

The stanza moves to the more fanciful imagery of a “haunted house” (Line 19) and a “ghost” (Line 20). These bring to mind the supernatural and the divine. The reader may see the house as a metaphor for church and the ghost as a reference to the Christian figure of the Holy Ghost, suggesting that true divinity could be found within nature if we only knew how to look for it. Another possible interpretation is a scientific one: using Enlightenment ideals to simplify matters of the supernatural through the lens of modern science. The speaker argues that in spite of our exploration, nature is much bigger and more endless than we could ever understand.