8.17.15

Ooo, do I love me some revelation about a well-known cultural fact that I've taken for granted all my life. (Case in point, the meme about how Beauty and the Beast is really about outcasts finding real beauty in each other and why that makes Gaston and the townspeople so scary. It shouldn't be a mind-blowing moment, but I guess the status quo was stuck in my head since childhood).

So, the latest of that ilk making the rounds is how we've been interpreting The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost wrong. (Charitably, maybe "simplistically" or "not contextually" would be nicer, but the shock is greater with the former!)

Here is the text, if for some reason you don't already have it committed to memory. (My brain is just like that, I can't help it)

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.

The traditional, pretty ubiquitous interpretation is that the subject is extolling the virtues of personal independence and not following the path of crowds and trends. What a lovely validation for an American audience, especially young people! However, this article brings up some interesting points: (citing David Orr from his new book here)

Except Frost notes early in the poem that the two roads were “worn . . . really about the same.” There is no difference. It’s only later, when the narrator recounts this moment, that he says he took the road less traveled. “This is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us, or allotted to us by chance),” Orr writes.

“The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism,” he continues. “It’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.”

And some further contextual argument:

In 1912, Frost was nearly 40 and frustrated by his lack of success in the United States. After Thomas praised his work in London, the two became friends, and Frost visited him in Gloucestershire. They often took walks in the woods, and Frost was amused that Thomas always said another path might have been better. “Frost equated [it] with the romantic predisposition for ‘crying over what might have been,’ ” Orr writes, quoting Frost biographer Lawrance Thompson. 

(...) 

One Edward Thomas biographer suggested that “The Road Not Taken” goaded the British poet, who was indecisive about joining the army. 

“It pricked at his confidence . . . the one man who understood his indecisiveness most acutely — in particular, toward the war — appeared to be mocking him for it,” writes Matthew Hollis. 

Thomas enlisted in World War I, and was killed two years later.

 Do you like to have your assumptions challenged? Or to be surprised by what a piece has to share?