Frosted Roads

I’m far from being a literary expert and even further from knowing anything about poetry (but, of course, I know what I like). That said, there are some poems I’ve picked up along the way and cherished. I’ve posted here about three of them: Desiderata, Invictus, and To His Coy Mistress. These poems all have foundational roles in my worldview.

Yet, surprisingly, I haven’t yet written about the most foundational of them all: The Road Not Taken, by the great American poet, Robert Frost. In my youth, a friend once whined at me, “You go out of your way to be different, don’t you!” Yes. Yes, I do. Just like the poem says to.

Except it doesn’t. It doesn’t say that at all.

It turns out to be a delightful example of how we construct reality, of how something that “everyone knows” is actually something else entirely.

It’s also a great example of how art is an ink blot. We bring ourselves to art and see ourselves in it. (Which is exactly why women and minority groups often feel disenfranchised from mainstream — that is to say white male — art.)

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What everyone “knows” comes from the last stanza of the poem:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

In particular, those powerful three last lines.

Certainly the idea of exploring where we, and others, have not been, at least for many of us, has a very compelling allure. It’s one reason people climb mountains and explore jungles.

In part it’s curiosity, in part it’s discovery, but it’s also a desire to take that less traveled path because it’s less traveled.

Some of us, yes, do go out of our way to seek the different. (It’s what being a gourmet is all about.)

And, in truth, if we take just that last stanza, it works perfectly well as a foundation for that gourmet philosophy. We’re always free to take what we want from art.

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Even when it’s the opposite of what the author really said.

If nothing else, one can always take art as the seed for one’s own thinking. (I think that’s generally how it should go. We are not mere vessels into which art is poured. We are sieves; art passes through and we catch bits of it.)

A hint lies in the poem’s title: The Road Not Taken

Not the road less traveled, but the road not taken. In fact, the poem explicitly says, of that other road, “Though as for that the passing there, Had worn them really about the same.”

It immediately goes on to say, “And both that morning equally lay, In leaves, no step had trodden black.”

So the other road is not less traveled. It is simply not taken.

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There is even a hint of dissonance in the first two lines of that last stanza.

Why is the telling speaking of “ages and ages hence,” and why “telling this with a sigh”? If the roads really weren’t different, what made so much difference?

Could it be the speaker will tell a different tale in the future?

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I think it’s lines like this that explain why I never got around to writing about something that is such a formative work for me.

I’m not particular good at literary interpretation (so much goes over my head), but I never felt like I really understood the poem. I just, as so many have, founded a philosophy on my interpretation of it.

Which, as I said, is valid, but it’s fascinating to me how something so deeply a part of our culture turns out to be something else entirely.

The idea supposed espoused by the poem is so well-known that it is used world-wide as a meme. Everyone knows what it means. Everyone gets it. It’s as well-recognized as Micky Mouse and Superman.

A major cross-culture landmark, and it’s not what nearly everyone thinks it is. (It’s a bit like that “Eskimos have 50 words for snow thing,” which is also not true.)

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The reality is that Frost wrote the poem for a friend of his, Edward Thomas, who Frost once said was “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way.”

Apparently Thomas was inclined to agonize over decisions and fret about the ones he made. Frost’s poem is, in fact, lighthearted mockery.

The, oh so poetic, irony here is that Frost sending the poem to his friend caused Thomas, who’d been struggling over whether to join his good friend Frost in America, or go off to war and defend his native land, England, to finally decide.

In 1915, Edward Thomas enlisted. He was killed in action in 1917.

Which adds a very poignant background to the poem.

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Here’s a very good YouTube video that explores this background:

There’s also this pretty good article from 2015 — the one-hundred-year anniversary of the poem.

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And here’s the full text of the poem:

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn 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 day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Stay Frosty, my friends!

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