It’s the kind of thing most scholars only dream of. Robert Stilling, a graduate student at the University of Virginia, recently discovered an unpublished poem by Robert Frost, while browsing through correspondence relating to the poet in the university’s library. A 1947 letter from one of the writer’s close friends referred to an unpublished poem that Frost had written on an inside page of a book, which turned out to be in the university’s collection.

A story in The Guardian says the poem, “‘War Thoughts at Home,’ casts light on the development of Frost’s first world war poetry. It was written in 1918, shortly after his good friend, Edward Thomas, died in the trenches of France.”

The Guardian explains that the poem “is set in a snow-bound house at the time of the first world war. Some blue jays are fighting outside the back door — ‘this flurry of bird war.’ The woman of the house is disturbed from her sewing and goes to the window. The birds fall silent, and in the next stanza one bird says to the other: ‘We must watch our chance/ And escape one by one/ Though the fight is no more done/ Than the war is in France.’ The woman thinks of the winter camps ‘where soldiers for France are made,’ then draws the shades. Outside the sheds look like “cars that long have lain/ Dead on a side track.”

The poem is a remarkable find, but the timing of this discovery when so many people are thinking about war and its costs makes it seem especially remarkable. But maybe Quillblog is just a little superstitious.

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Click here for the story in The Guardian