Robert Frost & "The Road Not Taken"

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Essay from Essex

“Robert Frost & ‘The Road Not Taken’”

May 16, 2020

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”

                                                                                                Robert Frost (1874-1963)

                                                                                                “The Road Not Taken,” 1915        

                                                                                                Mountain Interval, 1916

The Preserve is a thousand-acre tract that abuts the one hundred acres owned by Essex Meadows. A fire road wends through it. A few weeks ago, Caroline and I were walking, when we came to the fork depicted in the attached photograph – two roads diverging, not in a yellow wood as this was spring but at least in a wood. Being New England bred and born, Robert Frost’s poem burst into my consciousness.

“The Road Not Taken” is Frost’s most famous poem and is considered his most misunderstood. It was written in June 1915 for his friend, the Welch poet Edward Thomas, with whom Frost would go on long walks when visiting in Britain. “Thomas,” wrote the American poet Katherine Robinson five years ago, “…was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and…[he] often lamented they should have taken the other.” It was a habit about which Frost teased his friend. When “The Road Not Taken” was published in 1916, Europe was engulfed in a war that would kill 700,000 British soldiers, something a reader should keep in mind. One of the victims was Edward Thomas who went to France in late 1916 and was killed on the first day of the Second Battle of Arras in April 1917. He was thirty-nine

The following is the opening stanza of one of Thomas’ “war” poems, “Lights Out:”

“I have come to the borders of sleep,

The unfathomable deep

Forest where all must lose

Their way, however straight,

Or winding, soon or late;

They cannot choose.”

One can see why Frost admired his friend.

To return to “The Road Not Taken,” the poem’s obfuscation added to its fame. David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times and professor at Cornell, wrote that Frost “wanted to juxtapose two visions …”, the first in which the poet rues that he “…could not travel both,” and then later congratulates himself, as he “…took the one less traveled by.”  Professor Orr described the poem as a “kind of thaumatrope,” an optical toy with two opposing pictures that when spun merge into a single picture.

Some of the images add to the ambiguities Frost employed. He describes one road “as grassy and wanted wear,” yet a few words later “…that the passing there/Had worn them really about the same.” Then, does the “sigh” in the last stanza invoke disappointment or contentedness? And, in the last line, do the words “And that has made all the difference,” refer to a positive or negative experience?

I read poetry without analyzing it – my imagination and feelings determine what is meant, at least for me, and I recognize my interpretation may change from one day to the next. This poem is short, consisting of four stanzas of five lines, with four stressed syllables per line; the rhyming pattern – ABAAB – is pleasing to the ear. To me it invokes the woods through which my wife and I now walk and reminds me of my youth in New Hampshire, and the mile-and-a-half trek through the woods to my grandparent’s summer home. We would pass by a watering hole, proceed through an iron gate and make our way to the top of the hill, where cows grazed, and white clouds skidded across the blue sky. And on the way, of course there were birches – “One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.” One could do worse than be a reader of Frost.

As a conservative, I look upon the photograph as a metaphor and smile. I know these roads. The one to the right climbs and leads west toward the future, while the one to the left descends into the nether regions of the east and the past. 

The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost

 

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.