We studied Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” when I was in seventh grade. It’s the poem about two paths diverging in a yellow wood and the speaker, the poet, needing to select which path he should take. The last couplet is what everyone remembers:
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
My teacher told us that the couplet extolled Frost’s prescience in selecting his own way, the poet’s way—the way less traveled—over the ordinary, the more heavily-worn path. But I was struck by another idea.
Three times earlier in the poem, Frost makes it clear that the paths were not different in wear or attraction. Poets don’t waste words. I already knew this from my father—another poet. So here is what I figured. If Frost tells us three times in so short a poem that the paths were similar in wear, but then, at the end, he refers to one of them as being the less traveled, he must want us to notice the reversal. He must mean something poetical by the reversal. As readers, as I understood our job, we should discover his meaning.
Here is how Frost tells us the paths are the same—
Then took the other, as just as fair
and
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same
and
And both that morning equally lay,
In leaves no step had trodden black
I was delighted! Frost was being subtler than my teacher imagined. Frost was saying two things, not one, and the saying of both of them in so short and seemingly simple a poem made the final couplet more interesting than my teacher supposed. As I sat in class and listened to my teacher, it came to me suddenly what Frost might mean. I was only fourteen-years-old, but I could imagine a time when, later as a man, I might reflect backwards upon a moment when I made a life’s pathway choice. As I would acknowledge then, by choosing one pathway, of course I had not chosen the other. Then I might congratulate myself on the wisdom of my choice. That was as far as my teacher’s interpretation of the poem went, for, after all, Frost had become a prominent man by following his poetical choice. But, instead, here is what I thought Frost might really mean. If each of the pathways is of equal wear and looks the same when we make our original choice, then everyone’s chosen pathway is the road less traveled by. Every one of us takes the road less traveled because no one else but we ourselves could have traveled that road. And therefore each of our pathways, individually chosen by each of us, has made all the difference.
I was almost breathless with excitement about my idea. Our homework that evening was to prepare ourselves for discussion of the poem on the next day. So, when I got home, I asked Mr. Frost—who had stopped by for dinner—what he thought of my idea. I had always liked Frost, who had that granite face and shock of unruly white hair. Particularly, I liked him for the fact that he played his part as the gruff New England versifier very well, but with a yankier and yankier twinkle in his eye. And there were times when his eye would catch mine, and he would shoot me a dart that delighted me because his dart told me how much fun he thought all this was.
Gratifyingly, in his Robert-like way, he responded to my interpretation by saying, “Good, Dikkon.” He smiled. “You’ve said it almost as well as I did.”
Thus armed, I went to school with every expectation of heroism. English class came, we took out our books, our teacher asked if anyone had ideas, I raised my hand, I was called upon. “Well, as a matter of fact, I was having dinner with Robert Frost last night, and he said…”
It was a disaster.
The teacher could not have been less interested to hear anything that came from, one, so unbecoming a show-off character as myself, nor, two, from so dubious a source as the author. I was soundly snubbed. I was made to sit down and not called upon through the rest of the day.
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