ON THE ROAD AGAIN

 Now when I read THE ROAD NOT TAKEN,  I laugh.

                                                               ***

I have always wondered what the heck "The Road Not Taken" was about. I understood, of course, that our American convention is that it is a poem about a person who walks a yellow road, comes to a fork, takes the less traveled fork (the unconventional fork), and in old age celebrates the difference this choice made. Unfortunately that is not what the poem says, according to Sarah Goss.
 
This is what the poem actually says. Some dude was walking along a yellow road, which forked. Both roads were "grassy and wanted wear." Other walkers "had worn them really about the same." Both roads "that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black."  In other words, according to the narrator, there was no discernible difference between the two roads. Neither road had been traveled recently. (There was no unconventional road.)

Then Frost concluded the poem by saying that when he is much older, older than the Higgs boson, he will sigh theatrically and claim that the road he took "made all the difference." That is a nice turn.  He doesn't say if it was a good or bad difference, because that doesn't matter. And who knows, anyway?  (When you get really old, you can invent the past you want and make it comic or tragic.)

Sarah scoured the 'net and soon learned that she was the not the first to read the poem closely.


1. 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.