By Dave Koschnick via Bob Dvorak. Bob says, “He was my college roommate 35 years ago — and sent it to me this AM. I wrote back asking if he knew where it came from. He just replied that he wrote it last night, inspired by the image of a pumpkin alongside I-787 in Albany (NY)…a very urban highway.”

The literature and poetry experts were all abuzz. A manuscript had been found, hidden away behind a bookcase where it appeared to have slipped many years earlier. The handwritten document appeared to be an unknown work by Robert Frost. The experts were called in to determine if it was authentic. The verse was very similar to one of Frost’s best-known works. In fact it shared more than a few lines. The masters studied it for months, analyzing the style, the handwriting, the paper, and the ink. Here are the lines of the poem.

Two pumpkins in an open field stood,
And sorry I could not harvest both
And one pie make, long I stood
And looked over one as best I could
To where it anchored in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was brassy and wanted air;
Though as for that the sunning there
Had ripened them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another pie!
Yet knowing how many pies end in the sty,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two pumpkins in a field stood, and I – –
I took the lesser for my pie,
And that has made all the difference.

The masters argued whether it could have been an earlier, immature effort by Frost that was a hint of later work. Others thought it came from Frost’s declining years and borrowed heavily from earlier work as the muse faded.

In the end they decided that it was authentic Frost on the Pumpkin.