English Literature E- ENGL: 1024
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.
History
Frost spent the years 1912 to 1915 in England, where among
his acquaintances was the writer Edward Thomas. Thomas and Frost became close
friends and took many walks together. After Frost returned to New Hampshire in
1915, he sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken". Thomas
took the poem seriously and personally, and it may have been significant in
Thomas' decision to enlist in World War I.
Thomas was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.
Analysis
"The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem.
It reads naturally or conversationally, and begins as a kind of photographic
depiction of a quiet moment in woods. It consists of four stanzas of
5 lines each. The first line rhymes with the third and fourth, and the second
line rhymes with the fifth (ABAAB). The meter is basically iambic tetrameter,
with each line having four two-syllable feet. Though in almost every line, in
different positions, an iamb is replaced with an anapest.
The variation of the rhythm gives naturalness, a feeling of thought occurring
spontaneously, and it also affects the reader's sense of expectation. In
the only line that contains strictly iambs, the more regular rhythm supports
the idea of a turning towards an acceptance of a kind of reality: "Though
as for that the passing there … " In the final line, the way the rhyme and
rhythm work together is significantly different, and catches the reader off
guard. It is one of Frost's most popular works. Some have said that it is one
of his most misunderstood poems, claiming that it is not simply a poem that
champions the idea of "following your own path", but that the poem,
they suggest, expresses some irony regarding that idea.
Frost's biographer Lawrance Thompson suggests that the poem's
narrator is "one who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice
made: belatedly but wistfully he sighs over the attractive alternative
rejected". Thompson also says that when introducing the poem in
readings, Frost would say that the speaker was based on his friend Edward
Thomas. In Frost's words, Thomas was "a person who, whichever road he went,
would be sorry he didn't go the other".
Regarding the "sigh" that is mentioned in the last
stanza, it may be seen as an expression of regret or of satisfaction, but there
is significance in the difference between what the speaker has just said of the
two roads, and what he will say in the future. According to biographer
Lawrence Thompson, as Frost was once about to read the poem, he commented to
his audience, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem —
very tricky," perhaps intending to suggest the poem's ironic possibilities. A
New York Times Sunday book review on Brian Hall's 2008 biography Fall of
Frost states: "Whichever way they go, they're sure to miss something
good on the other path."
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San
Francisco, where his father, William Prescott Frost Jr., and his mother,
Isabelle Moodie, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. After the
death of his father from tuberculosis when Frost was eleven years old, he moved
with his mother and sister, Jeanie, who was two years younger, to Lawrence,
Massachusetts. He became interested in reading and writing poetry during his
high school years in Lawrence, enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire,
in 1892, and later at Harvard University in Boston, though he never earned a
formal college degree.
Frost drifted through a string of occupations
after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the
Lawrence Sentinel. His first published poem, “My Butterfly," appeared
on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent.
In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, whom
he’d shared valedictorian honors with in high school and who was a major
inspiration for his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England
in 1912, after they tried and failed at farming in New Hampshire. It was abroad
that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke,
and Robert Graves.
While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to
promote and publish his work.
By the time Frost returned to the United States
in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy’s Will (Henry
Holt and Company, 1913) and North of Boston (Henry Holt and Company,
1914), and his reputation was established. By the 1920s, he was the most
celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (Henry
Holt and Company, 1923), A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company,
1936), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt and Company, 1947), and In the
Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)—his fame and honors
(including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased. Frost served as consultant in
poetry to the Library of Congress from 1958 to 1959.
Though his work is principally associated with
the life and landscape of New England—and though he was a poet of traditional
verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic
movements and fashions of his time—Frost is anything but merely a regional
poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes,
he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually
spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to
which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.
In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert
Frost, the poet Daniel Hoffman describes
Frost’s early work as “the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and
enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world," and
comments on Frost’s career as the “American Bard”: “He became a national
celebrity, our nearly official poet laureate, and a great performer in the
tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain.”
About Frost, President John F. Kennedy, at whose
inauguration the poet delivered a poem, said, “He has bequeathed his nation a
body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and
understanding.”
Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in
Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.
Robert
Frost and "The Road Not Taken"
"The Road Not Taken" is an ambiguous poem that allows the
reader to think about choices in life, whether to go with the mainstream or go
it alone. If life is a journey, this poem highlights those times in life when a
decision has to be made. Which way will you go?
The ambiguity springs from the question of free will versus determinism,
whether the speaker in the poem consciously decides to take the road that is
off the beaten track or only does so because he doesn't fancy the road with the
bend in it. External factors therefore make up his mind for him.
Robert Frost wrote this poem to highlight a trait of, and poke fun at,
his friend Edward Thomas, an English-Welsh poet, who, when out walking with
Frost in England would often regret not having taken a different path. Thomas
would sigh over what they might have seen and done, and Frost thought this
quaintly romantic.
In other words, Frost's friend regretted not taking the road that might
have offered the best opportunities, despite it being an unknown.
Frost liked to tease and goad. He told Thomas: "No matter which road you take, you'll always
sigh and wish you'd taken another." So it's ironic that Frost meant the
poem to be light-hearted, but it turned out to be anything but. People take it
very seriously.
It is the hallmark of the true poet to take such everyday realities, in
this case, the sighs of a friend on a country walk, and transform them into
something so much more.
All of Robert Frost's poems can be found in this exceptional book, The Collected
Poems, which I use for all my analyses. It contains all of his
classics and more. It's the most comprehensive collection currently on offer.
"The Road Not Taken" is all about what did not happen: This
person, faced with an important conscious decision, chose the least popular,
the path of most resistance. He was destined to go down one, regretted not
being able to take both, so he sacrificed one for the other.
Ultimately, the reader is left to make up their own mind about the
emotional state of the speaker at the end. Was the choice of the road less
travelled a positive one? It certainly made "all the difference," but
Frost does not make it clear just what this difference is.
What
Is the Main Theme of "The Road Not Taken?"
The main theme of the "The Road Not Taken" is that it is often
impossible to see where a life-altering decision will lead. Thus, one should
make their decision swiftly and with confidence. It is normal to wonder what
the outcome would have been if the other road, the road not taken, was the road
chosen. But to contemplate this hypothetical deeply is folly, for it is impossible
to say whether taking the other road would have been better or worse: all one
can say is that it would have been different.
What
Is the Central Message of "The Road Not Taken?"
"The Road Not Taken" suddenly presents the speaker and the
reader with a dilemma. There are two roads in an autumnal wood separating off,
presumably the result of the one road splitting, and there's nothing else to do
but to choose one of the roads and continue life's journey.
The central message is that, in life, we are often presented with
choices. When making a choice, one is required to make a decision. Viewing a
choice as a fork in a path, it becomes clear that we must choose one direction
or another, but not both.
In "The Road Not Taken," Frost does not indicate whether the
road he chose was the right one. Nonetheless, that is the way he is going now,
and the place he ends up, for better or worse, was the result of his decision.
This poem is not about taking the road less travelled, about
individuality or uniqueness. This poem is about the road taken, to be sure, as
well the road not taken,
not necessarily the road less traveled. Any person who has made a decisive
choice will agree that it is human nature to contemplate the "What
if..." had you made the choice you did not make. This pondering about the
different life one may have lived had they done something differently is
central to "The Road Not Taken."
The speaker opts, at random, for the other road and, once on it, declares
himself happy because it has more grass and not many folk have been down it.
Anyway, he could always return one day and try the 'original' road again. Would
that be possible? Perhaps not, life has a way of letting one thing leading to
another until going backwards is just no longer an option.
But who knows what the future holds down the road? The speaker implies
that, when he's older he might look back at this turning point in his life, the
morning he took the road less travelled, because taking that particular route
completely altered his way of being.
What
Is the Structure of "The Road Not Taken?"
This poem consists of four stanzas, each five lines in length (a
quintrain), with a mix of iambic and anapaestic tetrameter, producing a steady
rhythmical four beat first-person narrative. Most common speech is a
combination of iambs and anapaests, so Frost chose his lines to reflect this:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
This simple looking poem, mostly monosyllabic, has a traditional rhyme
scheme of ABAAB which helps keep the lines tight, whilst
the use of enjambment (where one line runs into the next with no punctuation)
keeps the sense flowing.
The whole poem is an extended metaphor; the road is life, and it
diverges, that is, splits apart–forks. There is a decision to be made and a
life will be changed. Perhaps forever.
What
Is the Mood and Tone of "The Road Not Taken?"
Whilst this is a reflective, thoughtful poem, it's as if the speaker is
caught in two minds. He's encountered a turning point. The situation is clear
enough - take one path or the other, black or white - go ahead, do it. But life
is rarely that simple. We're human, and our thinking processes are always on
the go trying to work things out. You take the high road, I'll take the low
road. Which is best?
So, the tone is meditative. As this person stands looking at the two
options, he is weighing the pros and cons in a quiet, studied manner. The
situation demands a serious approach, for who knows what the outcome will be?
All the speaker knows is that he prefers the road less travelled, perhaps
because he enjoys solitude and believes that to be important. Whatever the
reason, once committed, he'll more than likely never look back.
On reflection, however, taking the road "because it was grassy and
wanted wear “has made all the difference, all the difference in the world.
What
Are the Poetic Devices Used in "The Road Not Taken?"
In "The Road Not Taken," Frost primarily makes use of metaphor.
Other poetic devices include the rhythm in which he wrote the poem, but these
aspects are covered in the section on structure.
What Is the Figurative Meaning of "The Road Not
Taken?"
Frost uses the road as a metaphor for life: he portrays our lives as a
path we are walking along toward an undetermined destination. Then, the poet
reaches a fork in the road. The fork is a metaphor for a life-altering choice
in which a compromise is not possible. The traveler must go one way, or the
other.
The descriptions of each road (one bends under the undergrowth, and the
other is "just as fair") indicates to the reader that, when making a
life-altering decision, it is impossible to see where that decision will lead.
At the moment of decision-making, both roads present themselves equally, thus
the choice of which to go down is, essentially, a toss up–a game of chance.
The metaphor is activated. Life offers two choices, both are valid but
the outcomes could be vastly different, existentially speaking. Which road to
take? The speaker is in two minds. He wants to travel both, and is
"sorry" he cannot, but this is physically impossible.
What Is the Literal Meaning of "The Road Not
Taken?"
Literally, "The Road Not Taken" tells the story of a man who
reaches a fork in the road, and randomly chooses to take one and not the other.
What Is the Symbolism of "The Road Not Taken?"
The road, itself, symbolizes the journey of life, and the image of a road
forking off into two paths symbolizes a choice.
As for color, Frost describes the forest as a "yellow wood."
Yellow can be considered a middle color, something in-between and unsure of
itself. This sets the mood of indecision that characterizes the language of the
poem.
Frost also mentions the color black in the lines:
And both the morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Clearly, this is to emphasize that both roads appeared untouched, not
having been tarnished by the foot of a previous traveler. The poet is the first
to encounter this dilemma.
What Is the Point of View of "The Road Not Taken?"
The point of view is of the traveler, who, walking along a single path,
encounters a fork in the road and stops to contemplate which path he should
follow.
How Do
the Two Roads Differ in "The Road Not Taken?"
The two roads in "The Road Not Taken" hardly differ.
The first road is described as bending into the undergrowth. The second
road is described as "just as fair," though it was "grassy and
wanted wear."
At this, it seems the second road is overgrown and less travelled, but
then the poet writes:
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no steps had trodden black.
So, again, the roads are equalized. Yet, as if to confuse the reader,
Frost writes in the final stanza:
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
With that, we are left to wonder how Frost knew the road he took was the
one less traveled by. But Frost likely left this ambiguity on purpose so that
the reader would not focus so much on condition of the road, and, instead,
focus on the fact that he chose a road (any road, whether it was that which was
less traveled by or not), and that, as a result, he has seen a change in his
life.
Robert Frost
American poet
Description
Died: January
29, 1963, Boston,
Massachusetts, United States Books: Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening, Mending Wall, Children: Lesley Frost
Ballantine, Elinor
Bettina Frost, Irma Frost, Elliot Frost, Marjorie
Frost, Carol Frost
Two
roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by, and that
has made all the difference.
These
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.
In
three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on
A
four-time Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry, American Robert Frost depicted
realistic New England life through language and situations familiar to the
common man.
Born on March 26, 1874, Robert Frost spent his first 40
years as an unknown. He exploded on the scene after returning from England at
the beginning of WWI. Winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and a special guest at
President John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, Frost became a poetic force and the
unofficial "poet laureate" of the United States. He died of
complications from prostate surgery on January 29, 1963.
Robert Frost was born on March
26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. He spent the first 11 years of his life
there, until his journalist father, William Prescott Frost Jr., died of
tuberculosis. Following his father's passing, Frost moved with his mother and
sister, Jeanie, to the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. They moved in with his
grandparents, and Frost attended Lawrence High School, where he met his future
love and wife, Elinor White, who was his co-valedictorian when they graduated
in 1892.
After high school, Frost attended
Dartmouth College for several months, returning home to work a slew of
unfulfilling jobs. In 1894, he had his first poem, "My Butterfly: an
Elegy," published in The Independent, a weekly literary
journal based in New York City. With this success, Frost proposed to Elinor,
who was attending St. Lawrence University, but she turned him down because she
first wanted to finish school. Frost then decided to leave on a trip to
Virginia, and when he returned, he proposed again. By then, Elinor had graduated
from college, and she accepted. They married on December 19, 1895, and had
their first child, Elliot, in 1896.
Beginning in 1897, Frost attended Harvard University but had to drop
out after two years due to health concerns. He returned to Lawrence to join his
wife, who was now pregnant with their second child, daughter Lesley (1899). In
1900, Frost moved with his wife and children to a farm in New
Hampshire—property that Frost's grandfather had purchased for them—and they
attempted to make a life on it for the next 12 years. Though it was a fruitful
time for Frost's writing, it was a difficult period in his personal life.
The Frost's firstborn son, Elliot,
died of cholera in 1900. After his death, Elinor gave birth to four more
children: son Carol (1902), who would commit suicide in 1940; Irma (1903), who
later developed mental illness; Marjorie (1905), who died in her late 20s after
giving birth; and Elinor (1907), who died just weeks after she was born.
Additionally, during that time, Frost and Elinor attempted several endeavors,
including poultry farming, all of which were fairly unsuccessful.
Despite such challenges, it was during this time that Frost acclimated
himself to rural life. In fact, he grew to depict it quite well, and began
setting many of his poems in the countryside. But while two of these, "The
Tuft of Flowers" and "The Trial by Existence," would be
published in 1906, he could not find any publishers who were willing to
underwrite his other poems.
Public
Recognition for Poetry
In 1912, Frost and Elinor decided to
sell the farm in New Hampshire and move the family to England, where they hoped
there would be more publishers willing to take a chance on new poets. Within
just a few months, Frost, now 38, found a publisher who would print his first
book of poems, A Boy’s Will, followed by North of Boston a year later. It was
at this time that Frost met fellow poets Ezra Pound and Edward
Thomas, two men who would affect his life in significant ways.
Pound and Thomas were the first to
review his work in a favorable light, as well as provide significant
encouragement. Frost credited Thomas's long walks over the English landscape as
the inspiration for one of his most famous poems, "The Road Not
Taken." Apparently, Thomas's indecision and regret regarding what paths to
take inspired Frost's work. The time Frost spent in England was one of the most
significant periods in his life, but it was short-lived. Shortly after World
War I broke out in August 1914, Frost and Elinor were forced to return to
America.
When Frost arrived back home, his
reputation had preceded him, and he was well-received by the literary world.
His new publisher, Henry Holt, who would remain with him for the rest of his
life, had purchased all of the copies of North of Boston, and in 1916, he
published Frost's Mountain Interval, a collection of other
works that he created while in England, including a tribute to Thomas. Journals
such as the Atlantic Monthly, who had turned Frost down when he
submitted work earlier, now came calling. Frost famously sent the Atlantic the
same poems that they had rejected before his stay in England.
In 1915, Frost and Elinor settled
down on a farm that they purchased in Franconia, New Hampshire. There, Frost
began a long career as a teacher at several colleges, reciting poetry to eager
crowds and writing all the while. He taught at Dartmouth and the University of
Michigan at various times, but his most significant association was with Amherst
College, where he taught steadily during the period from 1916 to 1938, and
where the main library is now named in his honor. For a period of more than 40
years beginning in 1921, Frost also spent almost every summer and fall at
Middlebury College, teaching English on its campus in Ripton, Vermont.
During his lifetime, Frost would
receive more than 40 honorary degrees, and in 1924, he was awarded his first of
four Pulitzer Prizes, for his book New Hampshire. He would subsequently win
Pulitzers for Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937) and A Witness Tree (1943). Amidst these successes, Frost's family was dealt another tragic blow
when Elinor died in 1938. Diagnosed with cancer in 1937 and having undergone
surgery, she also had had a long history of heart trouble, to which she
ultimately succumbed. The same year as his wife's death, Frost left his
teaching position at Amherst College.
In the late 1950s, Frost, along with Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot, championed
the release of his old acquaintance Ezra Pound, who was being held in a federal
mental hospital for treason due to his involvement with fascists in Italy
during World War II. Pound was released in 1958, after the indictments were
dropped.
In 1960, Congress awarded Frost
the Congressional Gold Medal. A year later, at the age of 86, Frost was
honored when asked to write and recite a poem for President John F. Kennedy's
inauguration. His sight now failing, he was not able to see the words in the
sunlight and substituted the reading of one of his poems, "The Gift
Outright," which he had committed to memory.
In 1962, Frost visited the Soviet
Union on a goodwill tour. However, when he accidentally misrepresented a
statement made by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev following
their meeting, he unwittingly undid much of the good intended by his visit.
On January 29, 1963, Frost died from
complications related to prostate surgery. He was survived by two of his
daughters, Lesley and Irma, and his ashes are interred in a family plot in
Bennington, Vermont.
