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.
Notes
I was 15 when I first read this in my English class, and I remember being told it was a poem about choosing your own path. Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken seemed to celebrate the courage of being different, of refusing to follow where everyone else had gone. It took me years to notice something strange. The two roads were almost identical, and the speaker already knew he would someday tell the story differently. Perhaps we understand our lives by inventing a sense of necessity after the fact. Choices that were once uncertain become defining moments, and accidents acquire the dignity of intention. We become attached to these stories because they make our lives appear more coherent than they ever felt while we were living them. For November’s The Mask, and this week's The Theatre of Everyday Life, Frost reveals a quieter kind of performance. We learn to present our decisions as expressions of character, telling others, and eventually ourselves, that we have always known who we were. The road becomes part of our identity through the story we tell about taking it. And perhaps the most convincing performance is the one we no longer recognize as a performance. #RobertFrost #AmericanPoetry #ModernistPoetry #Existentialism #TheRoadNotTaken