Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” gets brutalized about as much as the Bible, when it comes to cherry-picking text out of it and expanding it into something maybe the author didn’t intend. According to some, it’s the most misread poem in America.
“It’s about taking the road less traveled! It’s about being unique, not going the way the crowd goes! It’s a celebration of my weirdness!” says the person so afraid of being similar to normalcy that body mods, hair color, and weird activities are put on like a uniform, less for like and belief, but more for association and identity.
We love that version of interpretation in our culture because we love individualism. Our life is nothing if we have not established ourselves as unique, different than the rest.
Of course, the title of the poem itself suggests otherwise.
There’s a regretful tone to the title alone. In the second stanza, you realize that there isn’t a road less traveled; Frost states that “as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same.” And by the time you get to the last stanza, you see the regret.
“I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”
He never says it’s a good difference or a bad one, just that the road he chose set the course of his life and that’s the reason. He’s not bragging about taking a rarely-taken road. He’s being thoughtful about the roads he didn’t take.
The poem is more about mutual exclusivity in choices.
In an April 7, 2009 blog post, I must have been thinking about this, admitting that initially, when I had to memorize the poem in high school, I thought it was about taking a path in life less common than everyone else. This is a comforting rally cry for a teenager or someone who hasn’t hit all the typical markers most people achieve in life (marriage, kids, career, etc.), but it is ultimately a trap we see destroying younger generations, one where a life that doesn’t “make a difference” or “change the world” according to extreme definitions is a life that doesn’t matter. It’s a trap that leads to confusion, dissatisfaction, disenchantment, rage, and a constant drive to be anyone but a normal person living a decent life, inadvertently changing the world through that decent life.
I wrote:
But there are two lines in the preceding stanza, lines that are important but get lost in the focus on picking the path few others take:
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 realized that it was maybe as important to take not just a road less traveled, but to take a road that doesn't allow you to come back to where you were. It's about change and not reversal. Making the best choices you can, and then living with them because you don't get to redo them. Taking responsibility for the path you picked.
It is less about choosing an untraveled path, but more about choosing a path that won't let you get back to where you started. I have to stop thinking that there are do-overs in life; until I realize that, I whine and complain and sit along the road edge feeling lost because I can't find my way back.
There is no back, for way leads onto way. Go forward.
I would imagine Frost might find the over-dissection of his poem a bit frustrating, though some would consider Frost a terrifying poet in general whose lovely surface words hid much darker meaning and maybe he wouldn’t mind it at all.
I thought I remembered reading that the poem in question was directed at a friend who over-thought his decisions, a gentle nudge to tell him that you choose a road and walk it, not sit at the fork and be paralyzed. Perhaps we the reader are to be reminded we should be deliberate in our choices in life but above all, make a choice and live it well.
What is interesting to me, as I read the poem now, is that I realize Frost uses the word “road” not “path.”
We aren’t forging a path in the wilderness; there is a road already there, to the great disappointment of each generation who thinks what they are doing is new. There’s nothing new under the sun. What has been will be again, over and over.
And when we come to Frost’s line about taking the road less traveled, remembering the title of the poem is “The Road Not Taken,” it might come down to something as basic as I was trying to fumble around with back in 2009: I made these choices in life. I can’t go back. I have to go forward. I have to decide where I’m going to walk and keep making that decision.
There were some well-traveled roads that came with advice from all of those who’d gone before—some good, some bad—and some less traveled roads that I had to figure out on my own because we all have those roads at some point.
I think there’s also room for Psalm 1:1 in there, reminding us that we have a better life if we don’t walk alongside the wicked (who we travel with), stand in the road that the sinners take (the path we take), and finally sit down with the mockers (if we stop moving forward, what we become).
Of course, at the end of all the roads, no matter which we’ve taken, we all arrive at the same destination: death. The question then is what kind of eternal wages you earned along the roads you took that determine what happens at the end.