We may be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence, but for now the academic world is hyped about a previously obscure Robert Frost poem that a University of Virginia graduate student recently uncovered.
In typically dry Frost fashion, the poem's called "War Thoughts at Home," and, according to a press release from the university:
"…Written in 1918 after the death of Frost's close friend in World War I, [it] is especially relevant because it deals with the tolls of modern warfare."
Let's just hope the hype carries over the next spring, so that fewer graduates will have to cringe for the obligatory recital of "The Road Not Taken" in valedictorians' speeches. Our little horse would think it queer, though, if Frost, not entirely thought of as a WWI poet, overcame all the competition in that department–especially as plenty of erudite young British poets-to-be were getting gassed while Frost taught English at Amherst College in Massachussetts. (Before England entered the war, he'd been hanging out in England to write poetry, but he headed back to the States in 1915.) Which might even explain why the poem wasn't published back then–Frost would have looked like a bit of a poser.
Quotes and a summary of the poem in an Associated Press story suggest it won't hold up well against eyewitness, down-in-the-trenches accounts like those of Wilfred Owen.
Frost's poem imagines a soldier's wife in an old house at wintertime, when she is alarmed by the "rage" of some blue jays. She puts down her sewing, looks out the window and watches the birds.
"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."
The university could provide it to the public as a gift outright (isn't Frost kind of a national treasure by now?), but right now is only allowing partial quotes from it in the press. To get the whole thing, you'll have to buy it when it's published Monday in the fall issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. How thoroughly departmental.