During the Frost-bashing at the Spotted Dog in Carrboro, it was pointed out that, without "The Road Not Taken," fully half of American high school graduation speakers would have nothing to say. No one, not even I, pointed out that it's actually a pretty bizarre poem to present at such an occasion. Everyone knows that this is one of Frost's moral-pointing poems, and that he's saying that by refusing to blindly follow the majority one can find one's own true path: "I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." But everyone's wrong.
Frost actually didn't write many moral-pointing poems, and when he did, the moral was seldom a comfortable one — think of "Provide, Provide" — and "The Road Not Taken" is steadfast in refusing to point a moral. It opens with a first person speaker telling about coming to a fork in the road and choosing one way over the other because "it was grassy and wanted wear" and immediately denies the fact: "Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." And then, after some fairly inconsequential business in the third verse, there's this very odd last verse:
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 fellow doesn't claim there's been any difference made at all: he says that in the future he'll tell people there was a difference because of taking the less-traveled road, which he's just finished saying wasn't actually less-traveled. It's not a bad way of describing what Frost did with his poetic career. The man was in London with Pound; he only farmed because he'd been given land he was required to work for a period of time before selling it; far from being homespun he was a sophisticated and calculating careerist.
And a damned good poet, rivalled only by Whitman among the Americans.
8:29:43 PM
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