Deadsplinter Reads – A Poem

One Road Is Just Like Another

Dublin New Hampshire Roads
Parting of the ways - Dublin NH 1905 - Credit: Detroit Publishing Co. + Library of Congress

Hey, We’re Using Our Brains Here!

I thought I’d occasionally drop in a bit of reading because I know we have some pretty good brain thinking stuff people here. I didn’t see anything scheduled today until DUAN, but of course screwed up the first attempt to post this.

Anyway, without further blathering, here’s a classic bit of Americana, Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken (comments follow).

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.

Now of course this shows up all the time as some kind of anthem of bold individualism, inspiring ads for Playstation, Apple, and car brands including at least Ford, Chevy and Kia. And of course it only takes about five seconds to figure out that’s just dumb. The narrator says only ten lines in that the roads were so equally travelled that as soon as he went down one they were the same! What the hell, Chevy? Are you saying you’re the same as Kia?

Here’s The Deal

Robert Frost was a sarcastic bastard. He would have been the kind of uncle who would pull a quarter out “from” your ear when you were five, but instead of giving it to you, would stick it in his pocket and tell you he had stolen it out of your piggy bank.

He wrote The Road Not Taken to make fun of a friend of his who agonized over alternatives and then finally chose based on the most arbitrary reasons. And that’s a big part of what’s going on here. But not all.

I think it’s fair to say he makes that sense of regret palpable. He’s not just mocking, he’s sympathizing to some extent with the fact that we can’t do it all. The poem still gets a laugh out of the indecision and arbitrariness, but then gives a nod to the feeling. It’s basically saying don’t spend so much time worrying, but maybe a minute — the time it takes to read this poem — is OK.

Is Frost Really The Road?

Robert Frost
Robert Frost – Credit: Fred Palumbo via Library of Congress

Of course the author is not the poem. But the author is also not not the poem. Anyone who tells you there can be a complete separation of the two is a filthy rotten liar. A liar! But what you can do is at least is put them in separate corners of the room and look at just at the poem for a while pretending you don’t hear Frost breathing behind you.

And it’s certainly fair to say you don’t want to lean too heavily on the interpretation of the poem as a bit of snark. Why can’t I just like the poem on its own? you might ask.

Well, you can! It’s a lovely little piece. It has a fun rhyme scheme but can be read almost like natural verse in a conversational voice. And it’s nicely evocative of autumn in New England, which is absolutely beautiful, and who doesn’t like tramping around in the woods in the fall? There is no need to treat it as anything more than something to be enjoyed — the meaning isn’t significant enough to demand anything more.

What I’d say is bogus, though, would be treating it the way it gets used for car ads and valedictorian speeches. Don’t treat the class of 2022 like they’re dummies who can’t read!

How Far Does This Road Go?

So let’s finish (yay!) by talking for a sec about different levels of reading. There’s the most basic one of reading it for the sounds and images, and like I said, that’s a great way to do it. Poetry (usually) doesn’t have to go any farther, and sometimes it’s better when you don’t.

Stacked Stones New Hampshire
Stone Marker in Portsmouth, NH – Credit: Carol Highsmith via Library of Congress

Then there’s another layer, where you dig into the meaning behind the words, or above the words, or however you want to put it. Some meanings are better than other, like whether this is a poem about rugged individuals (boo! hiss!) or whether this is a poem about uncertainty and random decisions.

And then there’s the level of meta-analysis — like this stuff right here. Guilty your honor! It’s talking about ways about talking about the poem.

Just like interpretation, it can be good or bad. Let’s not pretend we’re not judging here. Everyone is, so let’s just say it. And I suppose you could say there is meta-meta-interpretation and so on up the ladder, but let’s not add more to the step stool than we really need.

Some meta-analysis is good, like this piece by Katherine Robinson which has a nice bit of history, a useful bit of mockery of Dead Poets Society, and some references to other analysis:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/89511/robert-frost-the-road-not-taken

And some meta-analysis, like this one by David Orr which Robinson links to, is not:

https://www.lithub.com/youre-probably-misreading-robert-frosts-most-famous-poem

Orr starts off with a bit of smarm in the headline and intro, and I have to say, if you’re going to do that you’d better be right. He gets hopelessly tangled up in questions of why Frost chose the word “road” instead of “path” and never once thinks about the sound and weight of the two words. That’s some bad poem analysis doing stuff right there! He doesn’t understand how roads in Frost’s New Hampshire worked — as often as not they just didn’t function the way he thinks. And he ultimately gets caught up in a false division between poem and joke, and tries to slip the conclusion into his assumptions. If it’s not strictly a joke, he claims it must be a poem and that makes it by definition (he wants us to swallow) something deep.

We shouldn’t swallow. While it’s true that it’s not a pure putdown, it’s not able to hold the weight Orr wants it to carry either. But that’s fine — sometimes you can just enjoy something for what it is.

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2 Comments

  1. …if I ever knew that frost hadn’t named the thing “the road not taken” from the beginning then I’d forgotten…but I guess one of the things orr labors that I could have had some sympathy for is that deciding that was the better title probably does say something about how frost wanted readers to consider the thing?

    …for my part I think I always assumed that it was “important” that the narrator spoke of taking “the [road] less traveled by” but the title implied that to some extent the focus was the route they didn’t take…in the same way that the combination of “I could not travel both/And be one traveler” and “Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back.” seemed to imply that the journey was to some extent intended to be a metaphorical one…in that otherwise the same traveler might well travel both roads in a literal sense

    …so the “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” that precedes the latter couplet sort of suggested that the unknown & untraveled path that would have followed the choice not taken would be something ruminated on thereafter…but also seemed to acknowledge that the story the narrator tells themself is one they know at some level is either a comfortable fiction in which both options were possible or that the choice can’t bear the portentous weight they’re inclined to give it

    …so the conclusion…which invokes an ambiguous judgement in hindsight about a choice made for what they admit to be arbitrary reasons between two routes with destinations apparently unknown to them when the decision was made…I think I’ve always taken to suggest that while picking one road over the other may indeed make “all the difference“…since it’s impossible to know what the specific differences would have been if they’d plumped instead for that “road not taken” on account of having not taken it…whether that was a source of regret or of satisfaction was more a function of what they made of their choice than it was of the choice that they made?

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