Frost wins! I’ve read many blog entries this week that tell me that, overwhelmingly, students’ favorite poet is Robert Frost. He is simple and clear. He uses beautiful imagery I can relate to. He rhymes and uses iambic pentameter (a rhythm and line length that matches the rhythms and speech patterns of everyday English). These are some of the many reasons students give for preferring Frost, and they are good ones.
Many students wrote about “Home Burial,” but just as many wrote about “The Road Not Taken.” Perhaps it is because I am getting old and crotchety, and perhaps I’ve always been slightly cynical, but I have grown tired of reading why it’s important to choose the road “less traveled by.” Like the speaker in Frost’s “After Apple-Picking” says, “I have had too much/ Of apple-picking: I am overtired/Of the great harvest I myself desired” (ll. 227-29). I don’t want any more apples. I want some pears. Or an orange. Maybe some berries. I want readers to look at other lines in the poem.
Here’s the one main thing I have to say about “The Road Not Taken”: it’s not as simple as everyone wants to make it. Every reader who loves the poem wants to focus just on the importance of taking the grassy, unworn path (the one that everyone says you shouldn’t take). Every reader wants to pat himself on the back for going down that less popular path, and he wants to believe that the choice “has made all the difference.” (Hey, I do that sometimes, too, saying, “I could have been an economic consultant and made lots of money, but I chose to become an English teacher and make little. That has made all the difference.”)
But I’m old enough now to know that it’s not that clear-cut. Every choice means we’ve given something else up, and those things we gave up might not have been terrible for us. This causes melancholy sometimes. The speaker says, “I shall be telling this with a sigh” (l. 16), not I’ll be telling this with a grin. He knows that he will never get to come back and travel that other road: “knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back” (ll. 14-15). Sigh indeed.
Notice that Frost did not choose for his title “The Road Less Traveled.” People often remember the title of the poem this way. Instead, the title focuses on “The Road Not Taken.” Don’t you think this is a meaningful choice? The mind lingers on what we could not do in life because we had to choose. The speaker is still looking down that untaken path, trying to see beyond “where it bent in the undergrowth” (l. 5). We can’t do everything. Life is short. And we don’t even really get to see what the other choice would have yielded.
Here’s what Frost himself said about the poem:
One stanza of ‘The Road Not Taken’ was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England: Was found three or four years later, and I couldn’t bear not to finish it. I wasn’t thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other. He was hard on himself that way.
–Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 23 Aug. 1953.
(Found on Classic Poetry Pages on “The Road Not Taken”)
originally posted 6-30-11