What if the poem you’ve been told all your life is a tribute to individualism, to charting your own course, wasn’t about that at all? There are few people in America who haven’t heard the Robert Frost poem “The Road Not Taken.” But what if it doesn’t mean what we think it means? Inconceivable, you say? David Orr, in his new book, “The Road Not Taken” offers some food for doubt:
“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.”
Wrongly referred to by many as “The Road Less Traveled,” the poem’s true title, “The Road Not Taken,” references regret rather than pride. That’s by design. Frost wrote it as somewhat of a joke to a friend, English poet Edward Thomas.
Orr posits that the poem grew out of Frost’s visit with British poet Edward Thomas who, on their many walks in the woods, always seemed to feel that the other path they might have taken would have been better.
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.
The poem was supposedly meant as gentle teasing, but Thompson suggests that Thomas didn’t take it as such, but rather mocking his indecisiveness over joining the military in World War I. Thomas joined, and was killed two years later.
So could it be true that the poem we thought we understood was simply meant to pull someone’s leg–and hence has been pulling our legs for over a century? Could be. I’ve been accepting the commonly-accepted interpretation, even though my own internal language critic has always been bothered by the ambiguity of the last line, “And that has made all the difference.” It never says whether that difference is good or bad. One could say “And I, I smacked myself over the head repeatedly with a frying pan until I developed seizures, And that has made all the difference” just as easily as “And I, I went against the grain, made a boat-load of money, and now sneer at all the dorks who used to mock me, And that has made all the difference.”
We know Frost was not above teasing with his poetry, as the poem “Departmental” proves. So who knows, perhaps Orr is right. We all love to attribute to Frost a certain rustic, quiet, even cryptic wisdom. Certainly there is as much or more wisdom to saying, “there’s no point fretting over what might have been” as “don’t follow the crowd.” So I suppose it doesn’t really matter which interpretation is correct.
But I’m grateful to Orr for pointing out that alternative interpretation. He certainly takes the road less traveled by. And it’s still an awesome poem, regardless. Here’s the whole thing, courtesy of Bartleby.com:
| 67. The Road Not Taken |