Today’s Poem: The Road Not Taken
Today’s Poem: The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost exhorts a friend to clear his mind and save his life
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The Road Not Taken
by 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.
After the battlefield death of Edward Thomas (1878–1917) , late in the First World War, Robert Frost (1874–1963) wrote to Thomas’s widow Helen that “I knew from the moment when I first met him at his unhappiest that he would some day clear his mind and save his life.”
The two had met in England, where Frost, still a literary nobody at 38, had moved with his family in 1912. Thomas, four years younger, was already a literary critic of some note, but lived under a cloud of paralyzing depression and self-doubt. Matthew Hollis writes in the Guardian that on the day of his first meeting with Frost, in London in 1913, Thomas “carried in his pocket a purchase that he ominously referred to as his ‘Saviour’: probably poison, possibly a pistol, but certainly something with which he intended to harm himself.”
Thomas did not, after all, harm himself that day. From 1913 to 1915 the friendship flourished. Frost the poet encouraged Thomas the critic to begin writing poetry. Perhaps more importantly, at least for Frost, Thomas was poised to shine a critical light on his friend’s 1914 book, North of Boston. The two friends plotted a mutual move to America, where Thomas would live near Frost in the New Hampshire woods, and they would be poets together.
In the midst of it all, the war broke out. The Frosts returned to the States in early 1915. Thomas, still tortured by the conviction that his life had been good for nothing, sought what we might, in hindsight, understand as another potential “Saviour” — to take up arms in the Artists Rifles and fight for the England he loved. The rest of the story we know.
One surviving relic of that pivotal friendship — without which we might have known neither man’s name — is Today’s Poem. Drafted in New Hampshire in the summer of 1915, published that August in the Atlantic Monthly, and included as the opening poem in 1916’s Mountain Interval, “The Road Not Taken” is A-Side Frost, a Frost’s Greatest Hit, Frost at his most quotable and mis-quotable, Frost at, perhaps, his most misunderstood.
The poem’s twenty tetrameter lines, parceled out in four stanzas rhymed abaab, present us with the now-familiar problem: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” It’s all too easy to read the poem as a hymn to cussed independence, the determined and self-determining embrace of the Road Less Traveled. But Frost wrote the poem for Thomas, still wracked with indecision. America, safety, and poetry? Or England and the war?
In the first stanza’s repeated, stuttering and, we can hear the jangling agony of that existential dithering. Frost twits his friend, but in making the ditherer the poem’s speaker, also enters imaginatively into that agony, and seeks, in sympathy, to bring it to some conclusion. “Edward Thomas was the only brother I ever had,” Frost wrote later. “The Road Not Taken” is a brother’s gesture, an exhortation to a brother poet, “to clear his mind and save his life.”
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The interpretation I heard and liked came from Howard Stern (not that one—he was a professor and poet) and was more or less repeated by Piper Chapman on the show Orange Is the New Black, viz.—the roads are the same (or at least there’s no way of knowing, at the moment of choosing, which is better or more traveled or less), a rational choice can’t be made, so the final stanza describes a future rationalization and romanticizing of the past choice. I recall Stern noting the self-important “I” ending a line and being repeated in that final stanza. On this reading, the poem is about the tragedy or absurdity of (at least some) major human choices, the pain of being but one traveler, of not knowing, of feeling the need to justify oneself (irrationally). But I’ve always wished for a slightly more hopeful reading—and been a little mystified by the “somewhere ages and ages hence” (where? Heaven? Hell?). The biographical backstory lends an interesting new dimension as I continue to live with the poem.
Thank you for this one. I've heard it quoted, generally with rolled eyes because so many consider it to be cliché at this point. The backstory is beautiful.
Now, I have a image in mind of looking back over our lives from a distance so as to see the wandering paths and branches we've taken to get where we are, like a silhouette of a tree's bare skeleton in winter. The backstory for this poem reminds me that we cannot know how short or long the path will be or when the next turn will come, so we best make the most of where we are. In any case, the shape and form of our path has beauty no matter which turning we take.