Robert Frost is one of the most critically acclaimed American poets of the 20th century, which is a roundabout way of saying you almost certainly studied one of his poems in school. Most likely, it was a short piece called The Road Not Taken- a poem famous for being one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted poems ever written, and a testament to how twisted the meaning of something can be by taking a quote out of context.
Oh, and it also played a small role in the death of the guy it was written about.To begin with, the part of the poem most everyone is intimately familiar is the last three lines:
From this, and this alone, it would seem the protagonist of the poem took the road less traveled by and this positively benefited his life over taking the more commonly trodden path…
While poems can have many different meanings to different people, and certainly parts of this particular poem are very much open to interpretation, what cannot be denied is that the central character of this poem unequivocally does not actually take the road “less traveled”.
You see, while it may come as a shock to those of us that had a habit of occasionally nodding off in school, the poem has more than just three lines, and the true meaning of (most of) it is fairly obvious if you just read the entire thing all the way through.
To wit, the protagonist of the poem goes out of his way to make it clear that the two paths are virtually identical- neither is more traveled than the other.
The setup:
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;
From this, you might actually think one was less trodden, except for the next line when the traveler explains he was really just casting about trying to find some reason to take one road or the other in the previous lines and that in truth the roads seemed equally traveled:
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.
Of course, one can’t just stand around in a wood all day, so a choice must be made. With no reason to choose one road over the other, the traveler takes one, then consoles himself that he will simply come back another time and see where the other road goes… before admitting that in this thought he was really just trying to fool himself once again, as he had tried to do previously by attempting to convince himself one path was less traveled than the other:
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
In the end, he states the most famous part of this poem, though including two key lines that are generally omitted when people are quoting the last stanza of this piece:
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.
So, in the end, while he was very clear in the present that the two roads were identical with no real reason to take one over the other, later in life he knew he’d once again fool himself, this time successfully, by instead remembering that one road was “less traveled by” and that this influenced his decision, when in fact he really decided on a whim.
Of course, it isn’t wholly clear at this point whether in “ages and ages hence” he is sighing and noting “that has made all the difference” out of contentment- that his reasoning was sound and that he made the correct choice- or regret, that he’d not been able to see where the other path went, perhaps to a better place than the one he chose on that fateful day.
It is generally thought that the latter, “regret”, notion is the “correct” interpretation, at least as far as the original intent of the author. Perhaps speculatively backing this up is the fact that the poem is called “The Road Not Taken”, rather than “The Road Less Traveled”, priming the reader to focus on the former, rather than the latter.
But is there any actual evidence to support one interpretation over the other, at least as far as Frost was intending when he wrote it (if he had any real intent at all)?
Frost would later state of the poem, “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem – very tricky” (Letters xiv-xv). Frost also called the poem his “private jest“. You see, Frost was well aware that people would misunderstand “The Road Not Taken”. He experienced this fact when he first began sharing it, with everyone taking the poem “pretty seriously”, as he noted after reading it to a group of college students. He also later stated this was despite the fact that he had been “doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling … Mea culpa.”
To delve further into the mystery, we must look into the interesting origin of the poem.
According to Frost, the poem was about his very close friend Edward Thomas, a fellow writer and (eventual) poet in his last years who Frost got…
The post Robert Frost’s Commonly Misinterpreted “The Road Not Taken” and the Role it Played in the Death of His Best Friend appeared first on FeedBox.