The traveler decides that he will keep one road for another day, but “knowing how way leads on to way” is aware that one decision leads to another and another and that he will never be faced with this same decision again.
Frost will confirm this at the end of the poem. If they were both untouched that morning, then there is a hint that at least one is no longer untouched. That morning neither path had been traveled, making the chronology of the poem somehow miss a step. That each path earlier that day “equally lay” suggests that the paths themselves have always been “equal,” with neither more worn than the other. In fact, stanza three reveals that “both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” At this point, the first image of a grassy path is juxtaposed with a path of fresh leaves that has not yet been blackened by steps. The first contradiction of this seemingly simple poem occurs in the latter half of stanza two, when the speaker reveals that “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” The roads, then, are not worn differently, as the speaker first suggests rather, they have both been traveled (or not), and the grass of both has either been beaten down or untouched. He decides on “the other,” which is described as just as “fair” and as “grassy and wanting wear.” The speaker imagines the other road might have the “better claim” on him, as it has not been often traveled. He cannot take both, so he looks down one as far as he can to where it “ben in the undergrowth,” hoping to determine which road might be better to take. The poem begins, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” The speaker is out for an autumn walk and is confronted with two paths. wanted to think it was here” (Spencer, 62). did no more than express (or conceal) the fact that the simple words and unemphatic rhythms were not such as was accustomed to expect great things, things like, from.” Thomas said it “staggered to think that perhaps had always missed what made poetry poetry if it was here. Thomas called the poem “staggering” in his response, explaining that “the word ‘staggering’. When Frost completed the poem, he sent a copy to Thomas as a letter, without comment. Lawrance Thompson writes that Frost had said to his friend Edward Thomas after “one of their best flower-gathering walks” that “No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another” (88). Frost wrote a portion of the poem while in Gloucestershire, England. There is some biographical support for a cursory reading of the poem. It has become clear that to know Frost is to apprehend the darkness in his poems as well as the light, and this darkness is evident in “The Road Not Taken” when it is read closely. French, and others, the dark side of Frost or the “other” Frost, as Jarrell phrased it, has been given much attention. But beginning with Randall Jarrell and continuing through Lionel Trilling, Roberts W. Part of what accounts for the popularity of “The Road Not Taken” is that Frost, until the latter half of the twentieth century, was viewed as a nature poet, in the purest New England sense. While Pinsky’s poll demonstrates the poem’s broad appeal, that appeal is at least partly due to its being most often read by people who do not read it closely enough to discover its complexities or who quickly dismiss those complexities in favor of the trite paraphrases that come to mind when people are asked what the poem might be “about.” Many attempt answers such as “taking a different road from that of the masses” or “being an individual” or “finding one’s own road in life.” And while none of these answers would be altogether incorrect, they all reduce the subtle complexities of the poem to platitudes. One of Frost’s best-known poems, opening his third book, Mountain Interval, “The Road Not Taken” was first published in the August 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. When participants were asked which poems they most liked to read, they most often cited “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” With more than 18,000 votes cast, from participants aged five to 97, Frost came out on top. After being named poet laureate in 1997, Robert Pinsky took a year-long poll to determine who was America’s favorite poet.
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