Otherwise, read it, slowly, perhaps even out loud.
If you know it well, you can skip over the words (though note that I’ve added line numbers to facilitate analysis).
The road not taken meaning professional#
But I’m willing to take a look at the poem and see if I can come up with something that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of pop individualism and professional knowingness. But what if there’s something going on in the poem that isn’t adequately captured by limning its meaning?Ībout a decade after Frost published “The Road Not Taken” Archibald MacLeish told us “A poem should not mean / But be.” Is there a way to approach a poem’s being rather than its meaning? “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. That just won’t wash, not when you actually read the words carefully.Īccording to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because 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). Everyone else hightailed it down the popular road but me, individualist that I am, I took the less popular road, and it turned out darn well. The common understanding, Orr tells us, is that the poem is about staunch individualism. It'll take a pretty determined individualist to take this road that's not been travelled in a looong time. It’s by David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and is an excerpt from a book he’s devoted to that one poem.
The road not taken meaning full#
So I read the posted snippet, which was about “The Road Not Taken” – I’ve read that one, I think, said I to myself, but it’s not the one about miles to do until we eat? pray? love? one of those basic things – and then followed the link the full article, which is in the Paris Review. This post had an intriguing title: “The Most Misread Poem in America”. But then who knows what really goes on in the minds of those kindly uncles, eh? He’s sort of the Walt Disney of American poetry, him and Carl Sandburg, but apparently Frost had a nasty side as well. I, being an American citizen in good standing, know a bit about Frost. Perhaps, he chose the less travelled one.After I’d sat myself down at my computer on Tuesday morning, and after I’d checked in at my blog, New Savanna, and at Facebook, I zoomed here to 3QD, as I often do, and saw a link to an article about a Robert Frost poem. ‘ Ages and ages’ is an example of alliteration. He accepts the fact that he is a failure in taking the right decision. Lines 17-19 “Somewhere ages and ages hence: The word ‘sigh’reflects that he is disappointed with the decision. This line is the example of the poet’s failure in choosing the right path. Line 16 “I shall be telling this with a sigh” Then in the third, he doesn’t think he will ever be able to come back and take the other path, as much as he wishes he could. The poet here saves the first road for another day. He knows how “way leads” to another, and then another until you end up very far from where you started. Lines 13-15 “Oh, I kept the first for another day! He couldn’t decide the right path as no step had smashed the leaves on the roads to allow him to go for the right one. It was tough for him to recognize the real road as in the morning he was the first person to walk on the road. Here, again, the poet found both the paths looking same. Lines 11-12 “And both that morning equally lay The ‘as for that” refers to the path being less worn. First, he found the first road to be the more travelled one, but then he says that both the roads to be equally travelled. Lines 9-10 “Though as for that, the passing thereĪfter travelling through the road, he found that both the roads are equally travelled. “Wanted wear” is an example of personification. Then the poet decided to check the other path because he found the other road to be less travelled and grassy one. “As just as fair” is an example of a simile. The phrase could mean something like “as just as it is fair,” as in proper, righteous and equal. Lines 6-8 “Then took the other, as just as fair
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