Poems for Friday: The Road Not Taken

Abandoned car on a broken road after the Hawke's Bay Earthquake, 1931

You've heard the following poem before, no doubt. It's one of Robert Frost's most famous and most overlooked at the same time. Most everyone knows, or has heard part of, the last stanza.

But read again, for I find as much in the first as the last. It is, like the paths its talks about, a deceptively tricky poem. Every day we make choices. Every last one of them carries an opportunity, and every last one of them has a cost.

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 marked 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.

Comments

[Brainwane]

Would you believe that just yesterday I was punning on "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" while learning a vision therapy exercise having to do with focus convergence? The eye doctor resisted but ultimately gave in.

[Claudia]

Hi David,

I read somewhere an interpretation that Frost may have had as much regret as pride in that last stanza, which is interesting to think about...

[Carson Ahlstrom]

It seems that, for you, the moment of hesitation bears more weight than the moment of decision. The poem has sort of become worn; people have been hearing it since they were little. But an interpretation, like the photo you included of the abandoned car, gives it a fresh perspective.