(1) Frost sends the poem to Thomas, with no clarifying text, in March or April of 1915. The sequence of their correspondence on the poem is a miniature version of the confusion “The Road Not Taken” would provoke in millions of subsequent readers: Instead, Thomas sent Frost an admiring note in which it was evident that he had assumed the poem’s speaker was a version of Frost, and that the final line was meant to be read as generations of high school valedictorians have assumed. In the spring of 1915, Robert Frost sent an envelope to English critic Edward Thomas that contained only one item: a draft of “The Road Not Taken,” under the title “Two Roads.” According to Frost biographer Lawrance Thompson, Frost had been inspired to write the poem by Thomas’s habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside-an impulse that Frost equated with the romantic predisposition for “crying over what might have been.” Frost, Thompson writes, believed that his friend “would take the poem as a gentle joke and would protest, ‘Stop teasing me.’” “ The Road Not Taken” has confused audiences literally from the beginning. Forward, you understand, and in the dark. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Poetry for Students is available in print and eBook format on our platform, Gale eBooks.My poems-I should suppose everybody’s poems-are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. We invite you to celebrate autumn with For Students! “The Road Not Taken” is one of many autumn-themed poems in the For Students collection. Perhaps, rather than assigning a definitive meaning toįrost’s work, we should simply reflect on the experience of walking through the Frost invites the reader to participate in the act of choosing when he presents us with the many ambiguities of his text. Neither meaning is correct or incorrect, but the act of making a choice reflects how a life is made, through the slow accumulation of decisions. Sigh in the final stanza is heavy, much like the misty fall air and theĬhoosing how to interpret “The Road Not Taken” is also an exercise in choosing between two paths. Surely something good was missed by taking one path over another. Road has made all the difference, but in reality, it did not matter because Meaning there is no right or wrong choice. In the third stanza, Frost describes the two paths as equal, Of individualism and a call to pave one’s own path, the autumn setting suggestsĪ bleaker meaning. While many read “The Road Not Taken” as a triumph Memory, longing, and a life once full of potential all come to the surface as the narrator stands at the crossroads, confronted by the weight of choices and the potential-and peril-of another. Just as he does in “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Frost employs an autumn setting in “The Road Not Taken” to evoke a mournful setting, not a cheerful one.įrost is perhaps using autumn to conjure regrets, aging, and the grim inevitability of human mortality. It is a trope Frost used in another poem, “ Nothing Gold Can Stay” ( Poetry for Students Volume 3), where he laments the fleeting beauty of summer and the onset of autumn. Why does the season matter? In poetry, imagery associated with autumn is conventionally used to evoke feelings of nostalgia, decay, and death. Grassy, meaning winter has not yet set in. Additionally, Frost refers to the path as Painting the woods yellow suggests the speaker is out for anĪutumn stroll when confronted with this consequential-or inconsequential,ĭepending on interpretation-decision. Roads splitting in a yellow wood, challenging the narrator with a choice of Is the poem really about individualism and choosing one’s own path? Or does the poem suggest the choice itself does not matter because all choices are equally valid and equally meaningless? The poem’s autumnal setting may lead to an answer.įrost begins “The Road Not Taken” describing two Despite its popularity, the work is perhaps one of Frost’s most misread poems, acquiring an optimistic, individualistic meaning not necessarily present in the text. Published in 1916, Robert Frost’s most popular poem, “The Road Not Taken” ( Poetry for Students Volume 2 and Poetry for Students Volume 61), is conventionally understood to be a meditation on the choices we make when confronted with a fork in the road.
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