The Fork in the Road: On Frost's Misunderstood Masterwork [by David Lehman]

Not the least of Robert Frost’s accomplishments is that he managed to balance popularity with artistic excellence. Take “The Road Not Taken” (1920), arguably his most famous poem. You probably read it in high school. You will find it any good poetry anthology. And indeed, in its wizardry, the poem deserves the highest accolades. The irony is it has often been loved and quoted – for the wrong reasons. The further irony is that this misunderstanding itself testifies to the subtlety and genius of its creator. The critic David Orr has written an entire book, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong (2015), newly in paperback, on this misunderstanding and the nuances of Frost’s design. 

Here is the poem:

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.

            The last stanza sounds heroic. The tone – a blend of nostalgia, wistfulness, assertiveness, and pride – is as irresistible as the rhetoric. Look at the last three lines. A master of repetition, Frost repeats a portion of the poem’s opening line and then creates all the drama in the world simply by repeating the first person pronoun, suspending it across two lines, and clinching it with a rhyme: “and I -- / I took the one less traveled by.”

           The poignant repetition, accompanied by a gently insistent rhyme, is a Frost signature. Think of the end of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which John F. Kennedy carried in his wallet:  “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, / But I have promises to keep, / And miles to go before I sleep, / And miles to go before I sleep.” The effect is magical. In “Stopping By Woods,” it is the specter of death that is evoked. In “The Road Not Taken,” it is the choice facing anyone about to commence upon a career.

            And here’s where the misunderstanding comes in. Generations of commencement speakers have quoted “The Road Not Taken,” because of its perceived message. Avoid the common route. Go your own way. Be a maverick, a non-conformist in the great American tradition of Emerson and Thoreau.

            But now go back to the second stanza. Note lines nine and ten. As far as the traffic on them, the two roads are “really,” Frost acknowledges, “about the same.”  Two questions immediately occur. If there is little to distinguish the two roads, what do we make of the last stanza? And if the poem is not a straightforward assertion of non-conformism, what is it about?

            One thing it is about is the inevitability of regret. You cannot “be one traveler” and take both paths. At any crossroads you must choose, and though you may keep alive the hope that you’ll return someday, you know deep down you will never get a second chance. “I doubted if I should ever come back.”

            What about the proud boast made in the last stanza? The key line, easy to overlook, is “I shall be telling this with a sigh.” The sigh communicates regret even as it paves the way for a stirring declaration of independence. But this declaration may just be a case of a proud man praising his own past.

            So subtle is this seemingly plain-spoken poet that he can have it both ways. He can appeal to readers who look for adages, nuggets of wisdom, and he can reward those who value subtlety and complexity. Frost’s economy is exemplary: the “yellow” wood in line one suffices to place us in autumn. And the vagueness of “Somewhere ages and ages hence” establishes that the speaker is an older gentleman given to recollecting the past with a distant look in his eyes. For those captivated by the poem, David Orr’s book is highly recommended.

.           When I teach “The Road Not Taken,” I ask students: What is the sneakiest word in the poem? Hint: it is in the title. The word is “not,” a powerful word because it gives presence to absence, summoning up what is not there. The poem is about the road the speaker takes, not about the one disdained. The road not taken is the road we will never know except perhaps in alternative versions of history, novels that center, for example, on the assassination of President Kennedy, at whose inauguration in 1961 Frost recited another of his great poems “The Gift Outright.”  --DL

Ed. Note: First published as a "masterpiece" column in The Wall Street Journal, October 14, 2016, under the heading of "Clearing a Path to Truth: Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ is a poem that’s loved for the wrong reasons."

For other readings of great poems click on these links:

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/01/what-trumps-vain-boasts-the-wizardry-of-ozymandias-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-1-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/02/introducing-emily-dickinson-part-ii-by-david-lehman.html

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/03/on-the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-by-david-lehman.html   
https://marshhawkpress.org/commentary-by-david-lehman-ben-jonsons-my-picture-left-in-scotland/

https://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2021/08/seizing-the-moment-on-andrew-marvells-to-his-coy-mistress-by-david-lehman.html

Comments

[Dave Read]

What evidence is there that Frost admitted of, much less managed, your supposed antitheticals of popularity and excellence?

What follows is all the evidence anybody needs that the last place poetry belongs is in anybody's classroom - especially the classroom of one who pretends to poethood, but has only the tools of scholarship:

"The road not taken is the road we will never know except perhaps in alternative versions of history, novels that center, for example, on the assassination of President Kennedy, at whose inauguration in 1961 Frost recited another of his great poems “The Gift Outright.” "

To profess mystical expertise in the leviathan of poetry is to be a barnacle with under a mortarboard. Please, at least, instruct your legions of supplicants that the great man recited the above-named poem only because the glare of the sun at high noon prevented him from reading the "occasional" poem he had composed for the event. Thank you.

[Slow Reader]

What a shame Mr. Dave Read appears not to have read Dr. Lehman's other outstanding essays about "famous poems" on this website (most of which I have printed, saved in a notebook, and frequently return to for spiritual guidance), or Dr. Lehman's own visionary poems forged in the fires of his personal experiences of intense pain and suffering.
For readers and writers of poetry like me, Dr. Lehman is a compassionate, shockingly humble and infinitely generous guide through the world of poetry, and a literary critic with an unsurpassed depth of knowledge of literature in the English language.
His essays on early English masterpieces have brought me light during hours otherwise filled with despair.
Because Dr. Lehman has suffered so greatly in his personal life, he understands what the rest of us go through on a daily basis: he does not preach to his readers of this website; he offers us empathy and illumination, and a slice of sweetness during our otherwise very difficult days.
Countless times I have told myself: If David Lehman could continue writing through the most excruciating pain imaginable, surely you can keep writing.
And for me, this essay, about one of my favorite Robert Frost poems, is a bright jewel.
A shame you cannot see this, Mr. Dave Read.
The loss is wholly yours.

[Dave Read]

Dear Slow Reader, Poems speak for themselves, or they don't speak at all. If your mind is not receptive to Frost's verse, then nothing from professor Lehman's mind will do anything but lower Frost's voice as it raises Lehman's.

That careers are made on the work of poets, painters, musicians, etc. does not validate an essentially parasitic practice. It's one thing to give a man a book, another thing altogether to tell him what it means, and why.

Read on - and read slowly - savor every phrase and line, my friend.

p.s. I was unaware that your shockingly humble hero is consigned to labor in a state of intense pain and suffering - anything you can do to help?

p.p.s. You id yourself as a Trumpster, by the ad hominem nature of your response to my literary criticism. In the land of feelings, are critics the enemy of the people?

[Bruno Anthony]

Dave Read, you have a great name, but it is you who stoop to ad hominem territory by labeling the other chap a "Trumpster." That's a foul, a flagrant foul.

[Bruno Anthony]

When you refer to "the supposed antitheticals of popularity and excellence," I believe the author's point, or one of the points, is that Frost could do both -- gain a large audience and write superb poems that merit rereading and meditation.