Newly Discovered Frost Poem

Robert Shilling at the University of Virginia recently discovered a poem by Robert Frost that was never before published. The poem, entitled "War Thoughts at Home" was scribbled on the cover pages of a copy of "North Boston", a copy of which was purchased from the Frederick G. Melcher collections in 2005.

I attended today a symposium on the newly discovered poem, which was about, as the name may suggest, thoughts on an erstwhile war while being in home country. It's quite obviously one of the private scribbles of Robert Frost, and probably not something he had ever intended to be published, but is still quite a poignant poem on war - one that strikes remarkedly close to home. There would have been many critics, many literature professors and doctors and people with permanent head damage who would have dissertated on this to death, so I shall not do this. I would instead write about my impressions on the poem when I first read it - because it made me think, as many things often do, of you.

Here is the poem-

War Thoughts at Home

On the back side of the house
Where it wears no paint to the weather
And so shows most its age,
Suddenly blue jays rage
And flash in blue feather.

It is late in an afternoon
More grey with snow to fall
Than white with fallen snow
When it is blue jay and crow
Or no bird at all.

So someone heeds from within
This flurry of bird war,
And rising from her chair
A little bent over with care
Not to scatter on the floor

The sewing in her lap
Comes to the window to see.
At sight of her dim face
The birds all cease for a space
And cling close in a tree.

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."

Than the war is in France!
She thinks of a winter camp
Where soldiers for France are made.
She draws down the window shade
And it glows with an early lamp.

On that old side of the house
The uneven sheds stretch back
Shed behind shed in train
Like cars that long have lain
Dead on a side track.

January 1918

Reproduced here with special thanks to the Virginia Quarterly Review who has published this Frost poem, as well as the Estate of Robert Lee Frost and Peter Gilbert etc. etc.

It didn't strike me half as deeply when I read it as when I heard it being read out loud. It's typical Frost, of course, very much in his style (yes, not a fake) so resonant of roads less taken and snow.

From the onset though, although this is only alluded to, I keep thinking of war - as child's play. But more than war, there was that sense of all the people with a purpose in their minds, however small or large, a goal that drives them away from their homes, away from people they love and from the people who love them. This poem is about those left at home during the war elsewhere, it is on (as the Boston Globe says) about the soldiers who have, more than families and loved ones, friends who love them dearly. This poem is about the life that seems to stop and stretch into infinity, in an afternoon, when a loved one goes away for an interminable length of time.

I am one such person, as you well know. I cannot hope to promise that this road taken would not end up, like cars that long have lain/dead on a side track. I cannot hope to promise that this is not one such side track.

When I look at this poem, although many say the line "dead on a side track" alludes to the death of a friend in the trenches in the war in France during 1918, and the war being a "side track" in the friend's life - I cannot help but think that there is also a certain death and stillness in the life at home. It is as though death in the war cannot go on without war thoughts on death, and death itself at home. The final stanza has images of things half used, being left behind and abandoned, as if waiting for re-use that is not to come. It is the life of the woman (it hints at her being old, as she is bent with care) also stopping dead in its tracks. It shows the stillness of waiting for someone from far far away.

With this I somehow think that "War Thoughts at Home" was appropriately named - not just for thinking about the war, which if you think about it happens quite briefly in the poem, but thoughts on another war on the home front. It is the anger directed at shutting out the blue jays which, trivial though it might be, are fighting their own small, petty wars, and the hope and defiance in lighting an early lamp despite there being light. It is the anger of disuse and misuse - and the gentle, silent acceptance that, like the blue jay and the crow, it is a part of life itself that war comes to us, and gently leave.