“The Road Not Taken”

“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood...”

So begins Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” written in 1915, one of America’s most familiar and most misunderstood poems. In his 2016 book, “The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong,” David Orr, long-time poetry critic for “The New York Times Book Review,” develops the two themes suggested by his subtitle: what makes Frost’s poem so quintessentially American and what makes it so easy to misunderstand.

What seems to stick in the minds of most readers (or listeners) are the last three lines of the 20-line poem: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.”

These final lines make such a lasting impression that many devotees of Robert Frost misremember the title of “The Road Not Taken as “The Road Less Traveled.” Indeed, according to Orr, more than 200,000 Google searches have been for Frost’s non-existent “The Road Less Traveled”! Readers make this error so often because they see the poem as a celebration of American rugged individualism, an affirmation of that independent man whom we Rhode Islanders have proudly placed atop our State House. Many of us hear the narrator saying: “Early on I was courageous enough and wise enough to make the tough choice, to choose the road less traveled; now I have reaped the benefit of my choice, a choice that has made all the difference.” It is no accident that back in 1978 M. Scott Peck elected to title his bestselling self-help book, “The Road Less Traveled.”

The trouble with this common interpretation of Frost’s well-loved poem is that it is not supported by the text itself. The last two lines of the second stanza directly contradict the notion that one of the two roads diverging at the forested fork showed signs of being less traveled: “But as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.”

Moreover, the narrator of the poem, standing at a crossroads in the here and now, is obviously in no position to reflect upon the consequences of a decision he is yet to make; the consequences of his choice can only be known far in the future, “[s]omewhere ages and ages hence.” He wonders if on that distant

day he might be tempted to reframe this present moment of choosing between two equally traveled roads by telling others “with a sigh” that he “took the one less traveled by.”

According to Orr, Frost – whom he describes as a “complex, sensitive, vain, depressed, difficult man” – cannot accept the fact that most of his readers fail to see the irony in “The Road Not Taken,” fail to understand that neither road is “less traveled by.” Frost himself suggests on more than one occasion that he has intended the poem to be a kind of parody of “romantic longings for missed opportunities” – whichever road an individual happens to take. This sense of “what might have been,” so palpable in this poem, is an essential element in the personality of the Englishman Edward Thomas (1878-1917), Frost’s close friend and fellow poet. Lawrence Thompson, one of Frost’s biographers, recalls that “Frost had been inspired to write the poem by Thomas’ habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside.”

An exchange of letters between Frost and Thomas during the spring and summer of 1915 reveals that Thomas was the first in a long line of readers who failed to grasp Frost’s irony. On June 26 Frost writes to Thomas that “the sigh [in line 16: “I shall be telling this with a sigh”] is a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of things.”

In his response to Frost on July 11, Thomas confesses that he still doesn’t get the joke and that he suspects that no one else will get it without an explicit explanation: “I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.”

Perhaps, in his crafting of “The Road Not Taken,” Frost is being, as the British put it, too clever by half. However, I would argue that this difficulty, this complexity, this ambiguity is precisely what defines the poem’s brilliance. I would agree with Orr that it is not helpful to see the poem as either “a hymn to stoic individualism” or as “an ironic comment on romantic self-absorption;” rather, “it is helpful to imagine “The Road Not Taken” as consisting of alternate glimpses of two unwritten poems.”

The great strength of Orr’s book is that he encourages the reader to experience “The Road Not Taken” in all its richness and tension: to read it both as a paean to American individualism and as an ironic portrayal of willful self-deception. David Orr has helped me to discover in the poem treasures I never knew were there. “And that has made all the difference.”

PS: We are living in a time when “Things fall apart; the center cannot

hold, / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” as the poet William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) puts it in his oft-quoted poem, “The Second Coming” (1920). Chaos here in America, chaos there in the Middle East, and chaos everywhere throughout the world at large.

Why, then, should I devote a column to the seemingly “disengaged” subject of a close-reading form of literary criticism? A writer, David Orr, writing about what another writer, Robert Frost, has written. I answer that in a deep sense, the majority of our poets and other artists of all types are working to bring us together through the unifying force of beauty, to recreate the center which has failed to hold. If only we could, we should go back in time 2500 years and ask our Biblical Psalmists what prompted them to compose 150 Hebrew poems which continue to nourish us to this very day.

JAMES B. ROSENBERG is a rabbi emeritus at Temple Habonim in Barrington. Contact him at rabbiemeritus@templehabonim.org.