Robert Frost's War thoughts at home [the full text revealed!]

This is a literary detective story in two parts. First, yesterday, Inside Higher Ed reported on the discovery this summer of a new Robert Frost poem. Over the summer, Robert Stilling, a graduate student in English at the University of Virginia, was conducting research when he literally stumbled over War Thoughts at Home.

Frost inscribed the poem on the flyleaf of his second collection of verse, North of Boston (1914), sometime in January 1918. It belonged to Frederic Melcher, his close friend and editor of Publisher’s Weekly. After Frost's death in 1963, Melcher referred to the poem only once in a short article. It appears that no one ever looked for it until Stilling discovered it among Melcher's papers now archived in The Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library at the University of Virginia.

Frost wrote War Thoughts at Home towards the end of WWI: The War to End All Wars or as the French called it, La Derniere des Dernieres - The Last of the Last. By that time, knowledge of its brutal horrors was widepsread. The exhalted rhetoric of the early months; We'll be home by Christmas, had given way to a cynical pessimism that the pointless carnage might last for years.

Frost's poems are neither modernist experiments nor obviously political, like many poems of the time. However, War Thoughts at Home is a folksy attempt to make sense of what was essentially a meaningless catastrophe. Many who read it now, will certainly draw none too subtle parallels with current events.

That is, if you can get a look at it! And this is where the second part of the literary detective story comes in.

The Virginia Quarterly Review has honored the request of Robert Frost's estate by not making it available to the general public. It is available only to VQR subscribers. Essentially, no one has free access to a newly discovered poem by one of, if not, THE greatest American poets of the 20th Century.

I'm a big supporter of the Creative Commons. They believe that literature and other arts should be freely accessible to all particularly if the creator is dead. So I spent this morning trying to piece together War Thoughts at Home. I googled and surfed over 3 dozen sites finding either descriptions of the 35 line, 7 stanza poem or small fragments posted with VQR permission. This is what I eventually came up with...

1.
The flurry of bird war [?]
….[?]
….[?]
….[?]
….[?]

2.
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.

3. [or 1?]
On the backside 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.

4.
….[?]
….[?]
….[?]
….[?]
….[?]

5.
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.”

6.
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.

7.
…..[?]
The uneven sheds stretch back
Shed behind shed in train
Like cars that have long lain
Dead on a side track.

Furtunately, my poetic archaeology ended when I found what I assume is the full text on a MySpace blog. Perhaps the blogger is a VQR subscriber? If she is, I applaud her contribution to the Creative Commons. Except for the missing stanza I think came pretty close!

1.
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.

2.
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.

3.
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

4.
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.

5.
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."

6.
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.

7.
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.