notebook on Robert Frost

resources

Overview / criticism at Modern American Poetry -

texts

collections:
@ bartleby.com: A Boy's Will - North of Boston - Mountain Interval - Misc. poems to 1920

The Road Not Taken

text: @ bartleby.com

commentary: Robert Frost is a deceptively simple poet. In this poem, his speaker, out for a walk, comes to a fork in the road. Which way should he take? It's a poem about decision, life choice. Choosing one's "way" in life. On the surface it's a minor event in a life, but taken metaphorically (which the speaker urges us to do), the event assumes symbolic proportions. Why has his choice of the road less travelled "made all the difference"?

Has it made all the difference? We can deconstruct the latent cultural assumption, one I'll call the Sinatra function ("I did it my way"), loaded with the ideology of American rugged individualism, of the self-made man, of the man who dares to be different, to strike out for gold. The poem's speaker projects forward to some distant day, when looking back on his uncharted, bumpy path of progress, he can say with a sigh of satisfaction, 'ah yes, it was all worth it in the end.' Taking the less travelled road made all the difference in my life. One can almost cue the Apple logo and the grammatically faulty tag line: "Think Different."

But Robert Frost was no sunshine superman. His is not a poetry of boundless optimism. His life and his work is peppered with distress, depression, and doubts. To ignore this tenor in his work when reading the poem is ill-advised. The poem is fraught with ambiguity. What kind of "sigh" is that in the last stanza? One of relief, of regret, or a little of both? Or is Robert Frost undercutting the whole idea of making such projections? How is one to know where the road of life leads? How long and how hard? In fact, we can push back against the poem's closing rhetorical flourish: will it have made a difference? Will it really? Is life that contingent? Are life choices always a zero sum game? What if none of it matters? What if this is a poem about the way in which people fabricate meaning and assign significance to even the most mundane of choices? Perhaps these are necessary illusions, the costumes we dress our lives in to make them relevant and meaningful. Remember, each road is more or less the same. Maybe it is how we think of them in retrospect that makes all the difference.

I see at least three interpretive options here: (1) the Sinatra function, also known as the Sigh of Satisfaction, (2) the Sigh of Regret (why on earth did I choose the wrong road), and (3) the vertiginous existential onslaught of decision and indecision, which must be repressed in order to assume either position (1) or (2). Maybe this decision is critical to my fate; maybe it's commonplace and meaningless, but I will invest it with meaning anyway.

An excellent collection of variant readings of this poem is available at Modern American Poetry.

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

This straightforward poem's speaker takes a mightily dramatic pause in the snow-filled woods of New England on a dark winter's night and turns it into a meditation on the tempting allure of "giving up" to nature and to death. It's the longing for individual peace, solitude, and oblivion versus the responsibilities and trappings of society.

An excellent close reading of this poem can be found in Terry Eagleton's How to Read a Poem [link]

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