Programme 2

The Road Not Taken

  Robert Frost (1875-1963)

The immense popularity of this work is perhaps due to sentimental reading, at the expense of the irony that it contains. It has often been read as a gentle, conversational reflection on the critical significance of incidental, impulsive choices in shaping one’s life. However, ‘You have to be careful of that one’, Frost once warned an audience; ‘it’s a tricky poem– very tricky’, (‘Letters xiv-xv’).

Something more subtle than a simple allegory may be sensed if we ask what sort of purposeful choice could ever be made, really, when (as is insisted repeatedly) both paths appeared ‘really about the same’ and ‘equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black’?

What makes all the difference, in the final stanza, is Frost’s deliberately grandiose, pontificating ‘sigh’ with which ‘I’ (rhymed repeatedly) will moralise triumphantly that a quite calculated (though actually quite impulsive) choice realised some critical consequence.

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 travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The satiric point, however, was entirely lost on his fellow poet and friend, Edward Thomas, to whom Frost sent a copy of the poem. On walks together, Frost revealed, Thomas habitually reproached himself for not having chosen an alternative path to the one they had taken. Frost’s mischievous lampooning culminates in the playful ambiguity of his final word.

Reflections on the poem are offered by the poets Jean Binta Breeze, Kate Clanchy, Michael Donaghy and Jamie McKendrick.