| The Road Not Taken |
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Context:
"Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. He moved to New
England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing
poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled
at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, though he never earned a
formal degree. Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving
school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His
first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November 8,
1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent. In 1895, Frost married Elinor
Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in
1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm
failed, and it was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such
contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves.
While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound,
who helped to promote and publish his work. By the time Frost returned to the
United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy's
Will and North of Boston. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated
poet in America, and with each new book his fame and honors (including four
Pulitzer Prizes) increased. (...) Robert Frost lived and taught for many years
in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.", Robert Frost at Poets.org.
Summary: "The Road Not Taken" was published in 1916 in the collection Mountain
Interval, his third book of poems, it is the first poem in the volume, and
is printed in italics to be taken as an introductory piece. It is one of
Frost’s most popular works, and also one of his most often misunderstood poems.
The
title of this poem may be the key to its interpretation, if the title were “The
Road Less Travelled” the poem would have a focus on nonconformity – taking the
path that others didn’t take, but the actual title focuses the poem on lost
opportunities instead, "The Road Not Taken", and the whimsical and
incomprehensible nature of decisions. The drama of the poem is the persona
making a choice between two roads, both ways equally worn and overlaid with
un-trodden leaves. The speaker took a path, and by doing so he gave up his
chance to take the other one, even though he tells himself that he will take
the other another day, he knows it is unlikely that he will have the
opportunity to do so. What would have happened if the made a different choice?
This poem is more than popular culture has made it out to be, it’s more than a
call to go on your own way, it is a reflection on life’s hard choices and
unknowns. He knows his choice will be important and influence the course of his
life, but he does not know yet how. There may be no difference between the two
roads, but “way leads to way” and is only by setting out, by working our way
into the woods, that we begin to understand the meaning of the choices we
make.The tricky part about the nature of the future is that the speaker won’t
know how his decision will change his life until it has already changed it.
This poem has created plenty of controversy, with different analysis and
readings of its meaning competing with each other to attain the “true
significance” of the author’s message but the key point here is really the
ambiguous nature of this poem, that extends itself not only to the choice of
the right path to take, if there might be such thing, but also of the right
interpretation of the meaning of the poem. The vast majority of the thesis
presented on this poem defend that the choice was purely whimsical, and only a
few critics defend it was premeditated. We chose to sustain that his choice was
arbitrary, but that his future will be influenced by it, and he might or he
might not regret it, but this will be more a question of chance than of a
premeditated choice, because life is defined as much by chance as by our
choices.
Liliana Pascual
Teresa Garrocho
