The Road Not Taken

"The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem by Robert Frost, first published in the August 1915 issue of the ''Atlantic Monthly'', and later published as the first poem in the 1916 poetry collection, '' Mountain Interval''. Its central theme is the divergence of paths, both literally and figuratively, although its interpretation is noted for being complex and potentially divergent.

The first 1915 publication differs from the 1916 republication in ''Mountain Interval'': In line 13, "marked" is replaced by "kept" and a dash replaces a comma in line 18.

Background

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. One day, as they were walking together, they came across two roads. Thomas was indecisive about which road to take, and in retrospect often lamented that they should have taken the other one. 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 his decision to enlist in World War I. Thomas was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.

Analysis

Structure

The poem consists of four stanzas of five lines each. With the rhyme scheme as ABAAB, the first line rhymes with the third and fourth, and the second line rhymes with the fifth. The meter is 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.

Rhythm

"The Road Not Taken" reads conversationally, beginning as a kind of photographic depiction of a quiet moment in yellow woods (imagery). The variation of its rhythm gives naturalness, a feeling of thought occurring spontaneously, affecting the reader's sense of expectation. In one of the few lines containing 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.

Reception

"The Road Not Taken" is one of Frost's most popular works. Yet, it is a frequently misunderstood poem, often read simply as a poem that champions the idea of "following your own path". Actually, it expresses some irony regarding such an idea. A 2015 critique in the '' Paris Review'' by David Orr described the misunderstanding this way:

The poem's speaker tells us he "shall be telling", at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled … yet he has already admitted that the two paths "equally lay / In leaves" and "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.

Orr concluded by noting: "It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads."

Frost wrote the poem as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas, who was often indecisive about which route to take when the two went walking. A ''New York Times'' 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." Regarding the "sigh" that is mentioned in the last stanza, it may be seen as an expression of regret or of satisfaction. However, 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 Lawrance Thompson, Frost's biographer, 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. p. 73

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 Thomas. In Frost's words, Thomas was "a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way."

Enduring fame

The poem remained very well known well into the 21st century. A century after its publication, David Orr in 2016 published an entire book about the 20–line poem, ''The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong''.

Its lines have been quoted in songs by Bruce Hornsby, Melissa Etheridge, George Strait, Talib Kweli, and many others, it's been the title of twelve television series episodes, its lines have been used in about two thousand news stories (1980–2016 alone), and the phrase "The Road Not Taken" appears as a title, subtitle, or chapter heading in more than 400 books on subjects ranging from political theory to a theoretical zombie apocalypse. A film named after the poem, “ The Roads Not Taken” was released in 2020 starring Javier Bardem and Salma Hayek.

References

External links

3 audio readings of The Road Not Taken

Critical essays on "The Road Not Taken"

{{DEFAULTSORT:Road Not Taken, The
1915 poems
American poems
Poetry by Robert Frost
Public domain poems
Modernist poems
Works originally published in The Atlantic (magazine)