The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost - Essay Example

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost Robert Frost is almost universally hailed as one of America’s greatest poets. His works are accessible and metrical, and many different meanings can be derived from his poems by different readers. While many focus on his poetry to give credence to feelings of security and appreciation of wit, Frost is also well-known to have a metaphorically darker side to his works thematically. It is advisable to trust the nature of critics and scholars who have complied a significant body of work on Frost, to compare and contrast their opinions with what one draws from the poetry oneself. Whether his message is one of indecisiveness and isolation or time-worn hope, when looking at one of Frost’s representative poems (“The Road Not Taken,”), one gets the sense that the poet himself is often purposefully obscuring meaning or providing multiple meanings, which can be taken as a theme of indecisiveness, and also can be taken as a theme of self-discovery and introspection. In “The Road Not Taken,” the main thematic concern does not employ a narrative strategy in which others are involved in the poem; instead, Frost’s narrator is communicating with himself in a spirit of indecisiveness. This poem is also very well-mannered in its sequential metrical base, use of alliteration, and simple alternating end-rhymes. It is the opinion of some that the poem is, because of its pleasant façade, largely misunderstood. It does take two or three readings to realize that the two paths proposed by the narrator, who reaches a point in the woods where two roads diverge and must make a choice between one path and another, are essentially 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” (Frost, 1983). Later in the poem, the narrator posits a future time when, recalling their hesitation between taking paths that are superficially similar, they will manufacture a sort of drama to surround the choice, with which the poem is complicit in revealing as initially equal. And even though the two paths appear the same, the narrator is still thrown into a conflict of indecision regarding the path to which the most worth should be attributed. This poem focuses superficially on the selfhood of its narrator in terms of choices. “Self-reliance in ‘The Road Not Taken’ is alluringly embodied as the outcome of a story presumably representative of all stories of self-hood, and whose central episode is that moment of the turning-point decision, the crisis from which a self springs: a critical decision consolingly grounded in a rational act” (Lentricchia, 1995). This is alluring because it posits that the self is the result not of a cumulative and irrational series of circumstances and influences, but instead a monolithic and dramatic decision that is seen to be final and complete. This reading of the poem focuses less on the inherent and implicit insecurity of Frost’s perspective as a man making a choice that will prove as mutable under temporal forces as the self, but rather focuses on the reaction he hoped to provoke in the poem’s audience. “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” (Frost, 1983). Lentricchia’s is a mode of criticism that tends to be rather reductive in its perspective on a poem’s importance not upon second and third thought and reading, but on the perceived reception of the poem by a debased audience to which the superficial aspects of the poem are oriented. These superficial aspects in Frost’s poem are worthy of note, however, in that the poem acts, as many of Frost’s poems do, as a sly sort of message in a bottle that is encapsulated in traditional and conventional metaphor while expressing a message that is quite philosophically urgent. In this sense, it is the critic’s duty to pay as much attention to the capsule as to the message, and it is worthy of note that the poem, superficially, offers its audience a calming and rationalizing depiction of the often-complicated process of self-formation and self-determination. “The particular fireside poetic structure in which Frost incarnates this myth of selfhood is the analogical landscape poem” (Lentricchia, 1995). It is the belief of the current research investigation that the structure of Frost’s poem is more of a vehicle for expressing the profound insecurity of decisions as they are made in the face of inexorable time than it is an incarnation of self from crisis, and this is the point at which one may disagree with a proposed reading of the poem simply in terms of its perceived audience buying into a myth, rather than looking deeper at what may be a core of inconclusive angst brought about by the mutability of supposedly concretized decisions as they fade over time and are changed by memory and hindsight. In his Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, William Pritchard tells an interesting story that takes place shortly after the publication of “The Road Not Taken” and that illustrates how a Chair at Amherst invited Frost to read the poem, “since it showed how, instead of acceding to the petty pleasures, the ‘countless trivial and vulgar amusements’ offered by the world or the money-god or the values of the marketplace, an individual could go his own way” (Pritchard, 1983). It is interesting that the faculty scholar saw fit to derive his own meaning from Frost’s poem, and certainly laudable for him to do so, since each reader has a unique perspective, but it is questionable whether or not Frost himself meant to infuse “The Road Not Taken” with such a spirit of decisive or categorical surety. Instead, Frost seems to have mainly meant the poem to be a sort of combination of a mocking tribute to hindsight bias and the realization that the weight placed on choices is fairly subjective. Frost’s work mainly reflected the regional concerns of New England entrenched in a timeless and placeless sort of philosophical trope which worked well for him. He was very conventional regarding meter, as shown in the traditional meter and tone of “The Road Not Taken”: critics and biographers have quoted Frost as likening a poem without the accepted metrical structure to a tennis game without a net (Pritchard, 1983). Frost was thought of as a modernist because his themes often involved ambiguousness of life and the irony of its passing moments. He died in Boston in the early sixties, leaving behind that an innovative and well-documented body of work. Knowing, then, that Frost was very conventional in regards to his metrical structure, but perhaps less conventional in theme, one must pay particular attention to the meter in “The Road Not Taken” as it acts as a sort of rhythmical counterpoint (the communication between poet and reader) to its theme (hindsight bias). Taking the poem’s meter apart shows Frost to be strictly adhering to a meter that nevertheless does not make the poem seem to give a feeling of stricture. It is perhaps one of Frost’s greatest talents that he makes the meter fit his moods and observations almost effortlessly, and this grace does not make the metrical flow seem forced at any point in the poem. This is perhaps achieved by Frost’s habit of running observations from line to line, so that each meter-bound line does not strike the reader with trite regularity, but still establishes a cogent and reasonable rhythm that has its counterpoint in the indecisiveness of the narrator. In “The Road Not Taken,” the main thematic concern and tone of the poem does not employ a narrative strategy in which others are involved in the poem; instead, Frost’s narrator is communicating with himself in a spirit of indecisiveness. As mentioned, this poem is also very well-mannered in its metrical base and simple end-rhymes, and it is again the opinion of the current report that when looking at this poem, one gets the sense that the poet himself is often purposefully obscuring meaning or providing multiple meanings, which can be taken as a theme of indecisiveness, and also can be taken as a theme of self-discovery and introspection. Whether his message is one of indecisiveness, miscommunication, and isolation or time-worn hope, when looking at Frost’s representative poem “The Road Not Taken,” one gets the sense that the poet himself is often purposefully obscuring meaning or providing multiple meanings as a way of culling the favor of any number of possible readings. Frost was thought of as a modernist because his themes often involved ambiguousness of life and the irony of its passing moments. As one critic states, Frost follows “popular genre writing and its mode of poetic production… But at the same time he has more than a little undermined what that mode facilitates in the realm of American poetic and political ideals” (Lentricchia, 1995). Frost passed away in Boston in the early sixties, leaving behind that an innovative and well-documented body of work that is the subject of much critical scholarship. REFERENCE Frost, R. “The Road Not Taken.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Alexander W. Allison, Herbert Barrows, Caesar R. Blake, et. al, eds. New York: WW Norton, 1983. Lentricchia, Frank. Modernist Quartet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pritchard, William. “Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered.” The Norton Anthology of Poetry. Alexander W. Allison, Herbert Barrows, Caesar R. Blake, et. al, eds. New York: WW Norton, 1983. Read More