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The Road Not Taken
But there's more to this poem than one might think, at first glance, and judging from the way it's most often quoted:
Summary
The speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with un-trodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day. Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will recreate the scene with a slight twist: He will claim that he took the less-traveled road.
Form
“The Road Not Taken” consists of four stanzas of five lines. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB; the rhymes are strict and masculine, with the notable exception of the last line (we do not usually stress the -ence of difference). There are four stressed syllables per line, varying on an iambic tetrameter base.
Commentary
This has got to be among the best-known, most-often-misunderstood poems on the planet. Several generations of careless readers have turned it into a piece of Hallmark happy-graduation-son, seize-the-future puffery. Cursed with a perfect marriage of form and content, arresting phrase wrought from simple words, and resonant metaphor, it seems as if “The Road Not Taken” gets memorized without really being read. For this it has died the cliché’s un-death of trivial immortality.
But you yourself can resurrect it from zombie-hood by reading it—not with imagination, even, but simply with accuracy. Of the two roads the speaker says “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” In fact, both roads “that morning lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” Meaning: Neither of the roads is less traveled by. These are the facts; we cannot justifiably ignore the reverberations they send through the easy aphorisms of the last two stanzas.
One of the attractions of the poem is its archetypal dilemma, one that we instantly recognize because each of us encounters it innumerable times, both literally and figuratively. Paths in the woods and forks in roads are ancient and deep-seated metaphors for the lifeline, its crises and decisions. Identical forks, in particular, symbolize for us the nexus of free will and fate: We are free to choose, but we do not really know beforehand what we are choosing between. Our route is, thus, determined by an accretion of choice and chance, and it is impossible to separate the two.
This poem does not advise. It does not say, “When you come to a fork in the road, study the footprints and take the road less traveled by” (or even, as Yogi Berra enigmatically quipped, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it”). Frost’s focus is more complicated. First, there is no less-traveled road in this poem; it isn’t even an option. Next, the poem seems more concerned with the question of how the concrete present (yellow woods, grassy roads covered in fallen leaves) will look from a future vantage point.
The ironic tone is inescapable: “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” The speaker anticipates his own future insincerity—his need, later on in life, to rearrange the facts and inject a dose of Lone Ranger into the account. He knows that he will be inaccurate, at best, or hypocritical, at worst, when he holds his life up as an example. In fact, he predicts that his future self will betray this moment of decision as if the betrayal were inevitable. This realization is ironic and poignantly pathetic. But the “sigh” is critical. The speaker will not, in his old age, merely gather the youth about him and say, “Do what I did, kiddies. I stuck to my guns, took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Rather, he may say this, but he will sigh first; for he won’t believe it himself. Somewhere in the back of his mind will remain the image of yellow woods and two equally leafy paths.
Ironic as it is, this is also a poem infused with the anticipation of remorse. Its title is not “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.” Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if does not want to stand forever in the woods, one for which he has no real guide or definitive basis for decision-making), the speaker knows that he will second-guess himself somewhere down the line—or at the very least he will wonder at what is irrevocably lost: the impossible, unknowable Other Path. But the nature of the decision is such that there is no Right Path—just the chosen path and the other path. What are sighed for ages and ages hence are not so much the wrong decisions as the moments of decision themselves—moments that, one atop the other, mark the passing of a life. This is the more primal strain of remorse.
Thus, to add a further level of irony, the theme of the poem may, after all, be “seize the day.” But a more nuanced carpe diem, if you please.
(Source: http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/frost/section7/page/2/)
History
Frost spent the years 1912 to 1915 in England, where among his acquaintances was the writer Edward Thomas. Thomas and Frost became close friends and took many walks together. After Frost returned to New Hampshire in 1915, he sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken." The poem was intended by Frost as a gentle mocking of indecision, particularly the indecision that Thomas had shown on their many walks together. Frost later expressed chagrin that most audiences took the poem more seriously than he had intended; in particular, Thomas took it seriously and personally, and it may have been the last straw in Thomas' decision to enlist in World War I. Thomas was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.
Analysis
"The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem consisting of four stanzas of 5 lines each in iambic tetrameter (though it is hypermetric by one beat – there are nine syllables per line instead of the strict eight required for tetrameter) and is one of Frost's most popular works. Besides being among the best known poems, some claim that it is one of the most misunderstood.
Frost's biographer Lawrance Thompson is cited as saying that the poem's narrator is "one who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice made: belatedly but wistfully he sighs over the attractive alternative rejected." According to the Thompson biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (1971), in his introduction in readings to the public, Frost would say that the speaker was based on his friend Edward Thomas. In Frost’s words, Thomas was “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other.
While a case could be made for the sigh being one of satisfaction, the critical 'regret' analysis supports the interpretation that this poem is about the human tendency to look back and attribute blame to minor events in one's life, or to attribute more meaning to things than they may deserve. In 1961, Frost commented that “The Road Not Taken” is “a tricky poem, very tricky” implying that people generally misinterpret this poem as evidence of the benefit of free thinking and not following the crowd, while Frost’s intention was to comment about indecision and people finding meaning in inconsequential decisions. A New York Times Sunday book review on Brian Hall's 2008 biography Fall of Frost states"Whichever way they go, they’re sure to miss something good on the other path.”
(Source: Wikipedia)
Comments
I ADORE your analysis; so very spot-on!
LOL, most of the back roads and trails of New England loop and cross and join up with each other anyway - not like here in the Northwest, where often there's only a single road or trail, and the only options are keep going or turn back. I was (and remain!) a relentless explorer of less-traveled ways, so this was my reply to that poem in my 20's:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Someday in Annwn, to Robert Frost:
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And got completely lost."
I didn't know that about the roads, thanks.
Have you seen Asadov's poem, btw, that I posted recently?
How neat about your elementary school name...there are some good ones around, there's one in DC that's a Paul Laurence Dunbar High School.
Our schools only had the city name and number, as in, "Moscow School #1, #2" etc.
And I can't take credit for the analysis, it's from two sources which are cited ;)
Edited 2015-07-17 02:05 pm (UTC)
Robert Frost is one of my favorite poets, and may be the one I know most poems by - Dust of Snow' was the second poem I ever learned by heart to recite for school. I've kiped a number of his poems to set to music: 'Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening', 'Flower-Gathering', 'My November Guest' - others that I'm not remembering now. It's his story-poems in blank verse that I love best, though, like The Witch of Coos and The Discovery of the Madeiras.
Not heard those poems set to music before; do you have a record or do you have these posted somewhere, by any chance? I'd like to hear it, if possible :)
Not read these blank verse poems of his, actually; shall have to check them out, thanks!
Have you read Ray Bradbury's poetry?
I mean to get a Youtube channel of my own this year, though, and start doing videos of all my songs and compositions - including my 'Dead Poets' collection: all the lyric verse of other peoples' that I've kiped and set to music. I just recently wrote a new one, Robert Service's The Man From Athabaska, because my bro posted Country Joe's version of it, which is so awful that it inspired me to make a better version, which I did, but now I'll have to send it out there to the world. LOL, when I get a minute.
Edited 2015-07-30 02:20 am (UTC)