Lost and Found: A Newly Discovered Poem by Robert Frost

When I heard that a previously unpublished poem by Robert Frost had been discovered, I was skeptical. I know Frost’s poetry well, having written “Robert Frost: A Life” and, quite recently, a small book in which I analyze sixteen of my favorite Frost poems. I never liked some of the later ones, such as “Quandary,” “A Reflex,” or “In a Glass of Cider,” which suffer from a kind of terminal cuteness, and I worried that this would be one of those.

With relief, I opened “Nothing New” on my laptop, seeing at once that it was indeed something new. It was originally inscribed inside a copy of Frost’s second collection, “North of Boston,” that was found in a retired educator’s home library by a family friend, a book dealer, following the educator’s death. It’s a good poem, short and aphoristic, from a period when Frost, writing at the height of his powers, had a special affection for poems of this kind: brief, rueful, tight, focussed. Among the best of these is “Dust of Snow,” written after Frost’s return from a few years in England, where he had gone to live “under thatch” with his wife and children. Coming home to the U.S., in 1915, he moved to a small farmhouse in Franconia, New Hampshire, near the Vermont border. There he began to write and assemble the poems that would appear in “New Hampshire,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry—the first of four that Frost would win.

“Nothing New” was written in 1918, not long before “Dust of Snow,” which was first published in an English magazine, in 1920, under a forgettable title—“A Favour.” Here is “Dust of Snow”:

The poem fits W. H. Auden’s definition of poetry as “memorable speech.” Frost’s unique gift was to write poems that burn a hole in your brain. You never forget his best lines. They stick with you—and they change your life. I can’t think how many times “Dust of Snow” has returned in memory and “saved some part / Of a day I had rued.” The language is simple and specific, the rhythms coördinated for maximum effect. The rhymes, along with an effortless two-beat line, lock the meaning in place. The whole poem is a single sentence, unfurling toward the thrill of that ending.

A splendid run of aphoristic poems peaks in “Fire and Ice” (1920) and “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923), which are for me highlights of “New Hampshire.” Rereading these, one sees the strengths and weaknesses of “Nothing New.” Its metrical form anticipates “Fire and Ice,” with a blend of rhymed tetrameter—a line of four beats—mixing with two shorter lines, “Nothing new—” and “The same dream again.” In both cases, the shorter lines summarize and slightly subvert the way the poem would appear to be unfolding. The poem opens with that “moment” when the “dust to-day”—foreshadowing “Dust of Snow”—turns to “spray” as it hits the face of the speaker. The dust is snow, in fact, the tactile experience of which resurfaces a “winter dream again.”

Frost is among the great poets of winter, for him a season of regret, even fear. (See Frost’s “Desert Places,” from 1933, for another look at winter as a psychologized landscape.) In “Nothing New,” the “winter dream” recalls a time when the speaker was “young at play.” But he was also “sad” in those youthful days. The present moment finds him “Yet strangely not more sad than then,” an observation that complicates the emotion—that is, he is sad but no more now than in the past. The line “Nothing new—” brings the syntactical roll to a skidding halt, as if to say, “Been there, done that. Don’t panic about me.”

The last two lines are astonishing to me: “Though I am further upon my way / The same dream again.” Reading this, I can’t help but hear the echo of a passage, from “After Apple-Picking” (1914), about “drowsing off” while looking through “a pane of glass” lifted from a frozen trough of water:

One can never read a poem by a major poet like Frost in isolation. Lines address, amplify, redress, and challenge other lines. When, at the end of “Nothing New,” Frost asserts that he is really “further upon my way / The same dream again,” does he mean further along his way through that “winter dream” first dreamt when he was young and yet sadly at play? I think so, and I also think that Frost must have felt some dissatisfaction with the way the last lines landed. There’s not the sublime totalizing effect that one finds at the end of “Fire and Ice” or “Nothing Gold Can Stay” or, of course, “Dust of Snow,” its more accomplished, not-so-distant cousin. There’s an open-ended, unsettled quality to “Nothing New,” even as it gestures toward a certain stoical resolve.

When gathering the poems for “New Hampshire,” Frost probably glanced at “Nothing New” and decided it wasn’t quite equal to the best in his sequence of aphoristic poems. But I wish he’d included it, and I’m glad we have it now; it has grace notes I would not like to lose. ♦