Submitted by Michael Heffernan, Feb 19, 2007 09:39

Anyone wanting to get a good dose of the terrible darkness deep in Frost should read "The Bonfire," from his third book, Mountain Interval (1916). While the book has in it some of Frost's greatest and best loved poems ("The Road Not Taken," "An Old Man's Winter Night," "The Oven Bird," "Birches"), it also contains some surprising and highly disturbing pieces, including "Out, Out--," "An Encounter," "Snow," and "The Bonfire." The last three of these are hardly ever anthologized and very rarely read. "The Bonfire" is a poem entirely about terror, especially the terror of war. Arguably a great poem about World War I, its ending includes the offhandedly grim truth, just dawning on the 20th century: "War is for everyone, for children too."

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