ENGLAND THANKS TO EDWARD THOMAS 135side, “A little bent over with care,” a woman rises from her knitting to look out
at this “bird war.” “She thinks of a winter camp / Where soldiers for France
are made,” and the poem ends,
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.Here Frost at home, finding blue jay and crow at war, imagines the woman’s
house now backing on a railroad wasteyard. Thomas, abroad, sees sunny larks
and magpies mating near a shell-torn French village.
His American friend, who’d written “The Road Not Taken” about him and
called Thomas “the only brother I ever had,” never got over losing him. “I
don’t suppose there is anything for us to do to show our admiration but to love
him forever,” Frost wrote to Thomas’s widow. And to another English friend:
“His concern to the last was what it had always been, to touch earthly things
and come as near them in words as words would come.”