Plain Speaking: Robert Frost

A man who is often dubbed “America’s favorite poet,” Robert Lee Frost, was born 150 years ago today, on March 26, 1874.*

Those who’ve stuck with me for a bit may know that modern American poetry isn’t really my wheelhouse, but Robert Frost  has some merit, never more so than with his poem, “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.

Poetry that reads largely as natural English language.  A chaotic (if it even exists) rhyme scheme.  Simplicity itself.

I don’t know where some of the modern interpretations of the poem have come from.  But today I read an article in the Telegraph that reminded me of one some years ago in The Paris Review.  One which comports far more with my own understanding of the poem and the way it was taught fifty or sixty years ago.  TBC, I never thought this reading of the poem was “chilling” (as the Telegraph describes it).  I thought it was pretty rational.

The guts of the argument, as I see them:

1. Robert Frost is an old-fashioned poet whose aim isn’t really to glorify his own experience, but is to make us think about our own experience.  (This hugely distinguishes him from most modern poets whose aim is to play on our emotions and hope that we’ll identify with, and sympathize with, their struggles and see everything through their prescriptive lens, no matter how daft or selfish it is.)
2. The Road Not Taken is a short and simple poem describing one man’s life experience.  Come later life (“telling this with a sigh”) he knows that folks will be looking at his early choice and–perhaps–making a judgment.  But he knows that he did what he did, and that–live or die–the chips fell where they may for the rest of his years on this earth.
3. When it comes to “all the difference” his choice made in his life, Frost doesn’t distinguish between how good that choice may have been, or how bad.  For all we know, the guy may have grown up to be a murderer.  Or a philanthropist.  We have no idea.  He made a choice, and he ran with it.  All he could do.

And don’t we all make such a choice?  Along the path to doing the best that we can? I can’t help thinking that what defines our future lives is often how we respond in the moment.  I think Frost knew that.  I think that’s the American Experience.

*I’ll never cease to be other than amazed that so many people who’ve been important to me in my life, whether IRL, or because I’ve run across them in other ways, were born well before the end of the nineteenth century.   I’ve often mentioned my great-grandmother, who was born in 1869, four years after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, and who died a few short months before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.  But there are many others, and Robert Frost is one of them.  (Rudyard Kipling and Beatrix Potter are a couple more.)