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Fleda Brown: On Poetry

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January 16, 2010

On Poetry: Choices in the new year

By FLEDA BROWN

If I picture this new year in the typical way, as a baby, I'm seeing that baby looking utterly baffled. Huh? What now? Within our country, we suffer with deep differences over the route we should take toward universal health care, over war or no war, over what to do about the environment, human rights, and so on.

But if we're honest, even inside ourselves we have our own ambivalences. How can we be sure which direction is right? Frost's poem is about ambivalence. To the quick reader, it appears to be a poem about how a strong person made a hard choice, a choice many others didn't make, one that has made a huge difference. Mr. Rugged Individualist.

But Frost is subtle, as always. His poems often seem simple, easy to understand. But as he himself warned, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem -- very tricky." He intended the poem as an ironic jab at his friend and fellow poet Edward Thomas. They used to take walks through the forest together, and Thomas always complained at the end that they should have taken a different path. "Oh you silly man," I imagine Frost saying to himself. "You and all your agonizing and aggrandizing."

It's also worth noticing the descriptions of the two paths. One is "just as fair" as the other. The grass on each had been worn "really" about the same. "Both that morning equally lay." So there was no less traveled path! The speaker is not the rugged individualist he claims to be.

Even the sigh in the last stanza, which sounds like regret, is probably ironic. In a 1925 letter, Crystine Yates of Dickson, Tenn., asked Frost about the sigh. He replied: "It was my rather private jest at the expense of those who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life."

Should we take Frost's word for what this poem is "about"? How should we read the poem? I guess if there's a "lesson" to be drawn here, it's that we'd better not jump to conclusions based on what we think the poem ought to mean, or what we expect it to mean.

Is there after all any "choice" in the way it should be read? It seems that when two roads, two possibilities diverge (in a poem, or in national politics or anything else, for that matter), there's a time for ambivalence, for confusion, for research, for gathering of evidence. There's reading with close attention (we hope). And at some moment, we turn in the direction that's been opened to us by our effort. It may not be the only possible direction, but it's the one direction we take because of our careful awareness. Seems like a good way to begin this new year, at least.

The Road Not Taken

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.

-- Robert Frost, 1916

Fleda Brown is professor emerita, University of Delaware, and past poet laureate of Delaware. For more of Fleda Brown's On Poetry columns, log on to record-eagle.com/onpoetry.

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