As senior Creative Writing majors toured Robert Frost's former home in Franconia, N.H., this past Saturday, the director of Frost Place made a very fitting announcement: Frost's celebrated and prolific collection of poetry was about to incorporate a poem previously unknown and unseen to the world.
The never before published poem of the beloved poet and one-time Dartmouth student Robert Frost was discovered by a University of Virginia graduate student this past month. Robert Stilling had gotten wind of Frost's unpublished work in May 2005 as he was examining a 1947 correspondence between Frost and his friend and supporter Frederick Melcher, in which Frost made reference to an "unpublished poem about the war which has not been reprinted." The poem was then discovered, handwritten, inside the cover of his second collection of poetry, "North of Boston." The copy had belonged to Melcher and was part of an uncatalogued Frost archive at the University of Virginia.
Entitled "War Thoughts at Home," Frost penned the dark, 35-line poem as a tribute to his friend, British poet Edward Thomas, whom he befriended while in Britain at the start of World War I. Thomas later perished in France on volunteer duty in 1917.
Beginning with a "flurry of bird war" and culminating with a train of sheds laying "dead on a side track," the poem tells the tale of a soldier's wife in an old house who becomes alarmed by the "rage" of some blue jays. As she puts down her sewing and glances longingly out the window, she recites: "And one says to the rest, We must just watch our chance, And escape one by one, Though the fight is no more done, Than the war is in France."
Stilling told the Virginia Quarterly Review that he was unaware of why the poem was never published -- though it will appear in its entirety in the Review this week -- but did mention that the loss of Frost's friend was considerably devastating to the poet.
Frost came to Dartmouth in the fall of 1892 as part of the Class of 1896, but he left within a few months, never to return as a student. Later in his life, the four-time Pulitzer Prize winner went on to receive nearly every possible award granted to a poet. Frost often returned to the College to lecture classes as the Ticknor Fellow and to participate in the Great Issues program.
Incidentally, the extensive Robert Frost Collection at the Rauner Library possesses 13 copies of "North of Boston" -- however, the University of Virginia was fortunate enough to have Melcher's copy end up in Charlottesville.
