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Lot 258

FROST (ROBERT)
Autograph manuscript of his poem 'A Peck of Gold', signed ("Robert Frost"), [1920's]

24 June 2015, 11:00 BST
London, Knightsbridge

Sold for £1,500 inc. premium

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FROST (ROBERT)

Autograph manuscript of his poem 'A Peck of Gold', signed ("Robert Frost"), inscribed for his fellow-poet Hilda [Conkling], twelve lines in three stanzas, beginning "Dust always blowing about the town/Except when sea fog laid it down/And I was one of the children told/Some of the blowing dust was gold..." and ending "We all must eat our peck of gold", 1 page, overall even light browning, no evidence of removal from a book, trace of glue on verso from former hinge, half morocco fitted box, 8vo, [1920's]

Footnotes

'SUCH WAS THE LIFE IN THE GOLDEN GATE / GOLD DUSTED ALL WE DRANK AND ATE...'

As the first poem mentioned in Jay Parini's Robert Frost: A Life, 1998, it is evident 'A Peck of Gold' has a special place in the hearts of both Frost and Parini. Frost published this poem in West-Running Brook of 1927, reportedly looking back nostagically to his childhood in San Francisco. Even with the Gold Rush long over, the city was still hustling and bustling with people and Frost wrote of it 'The excitement of the place appealed to my father. He was part of it. There was gold dust in his eyes, you might say'. After his father's death, Frost moved to Massachusetts, but he would always marvel at the impression that San Francisco had on him. As a child he had been told that gold 'was what they would eat, presumably instead of the plebeian dust mentioned to ordinary children in ordinary places' (Parini, quoting Robert Newdick, Newdick's Season of Frost, 1976) and appropriated the New England saying 'we all must eat our peck of dirt'. In West-Running Brook Frost gave the approximate date of the inspiration for 'Peck of Gold' as 'As of About 1880'. The first stanza of the poem is inscribed on a monument on Market Street and Drumm, at the foot of the California Street cable car.

Hilda Conkling (1910-1986) was a poetical child prodigy, whose poems were mostly composed between the ages of four and ten years and whose mother Grace Hazard Conkling, a poet in her own right, wrote them down on her behalf. Three collections were published in Hilda's lifetime: Poems by a Little Girl (1920), Shoes of the Wind (1922) and Silverhorn (1924). Frost knew the Conklings well and some of Hilda's poems have been anthologised with pieces by Frost.

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