Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about 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.
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,
And that has made all the difference.
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Notes
This poem was first
published in The Atlantic Monthly
in August 1915 and later included in Frost's third collection of poetry Mountain Interval in November 1916.
1 diverged:
diverge (Merriam-Webster) intransitive verb 1a : to move or extend in different directions from a common
point : draw apart
Ex. diverging roads b : to become or be different in character or form.
Ex. The friends' lives diverged after graduation. .
: differ in opinion
Ex. This is where our views diverge. 2 : to turn aside from a path or course : deviate
Ex. diverge from a direct path
8 wanted:
want (Merriam-Webster) transitive verb 1 : to fail to possess especially in customary or required amount
: lack
Ex. the answer wanted courtesy 2a : to have a strong desire for
Ex. wanted a chance to rest b : to have an inclination to : like
Ex. say what you want, he is efficient 3a : to have need of : require
Ex. the motor wants a tune-up b : to suffer from the lack of
Ex. thousands still want food and shelter 4 : ought —used with the infinitive
Ex. you want to be very careful what you say— Claudia Cassidy 5 : to wish or demand the presence of 6 : to hunt or seek in order to apprehend
Ex. wanted for murder
12 trodden:
tread (Merriam-Webster)
intransitive verb 1 : to move or proceed on or as if on foot
Ex. must tread lightly 2a : to set foot
Ex. has gone where others fear to tread b : to put one's foot : step
Ex. carelessly treading on the flowers 3 : copulate —used of a male bird
Letters
[To Susan Hayes Ward. ALS. Huntington]
Plymouth N.H.
Feb 10 1912
Dear Miss Ward:
[...]
To lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several
times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person
on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for
several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled.
Judge then how surprised I was the other evening to see a man, who to my own
unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming
down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect
being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I
felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I
felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noisless [sic]
yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with
the uncrossing of someone's eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb
this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile
journey home. But I didn't go forward to the touch. I stood still in
wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the final omission of
not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote
interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in
a wilderness at the [end of page 60] same moment of nightfall. Some purpose
I doubt not, if we could but have made it out. I like a coincidence almost
as well as an incongruity. [...]
Nonsensically yours
Robert Frost
[To Edward Thomas. ALS. Cardiff.]
Franconia N.H. U.S.A.
June 26 1915
Dear Edward:
Methinks thou strikest too hard in so small a matter. A tap would have
settled my poem. I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of
regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh was a mock sigh,
hypocritical for the fun of the thing. I dont suppose I was ever sorry for
anything I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel. [...]
[...] The line you object to has long since taken a different form. I
suppose my little jest in the poem is too much between me and myself. I read
it aloud before the Phi Beta Kappa of Tufts College and while I did my best
to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling, I doubt if I wasnt taken
pretty seriously. Mea culpa.
[end of page 321] [...] [end of page 322]
Yours ever
R
—The Letters of Robert Frost, vol. 1,
1886–1920, edited by Donald Sheehy, Mark Richardson, and Robert Faggen,
Belknap P, 2014.
For example, Frost once fashioned a dramatic mask out of an ironically
assumed posture—and employed it too subtly—in a now famous poem originally
used as a gently teasing letter: "The Road Not Taken." The inspiration for
it came from Frost's amusement over a familiar mannerism of his closest
friend in England, Edward Thomas. While living in Gloucestershire in 1914,
Frost frequently took long walks with Thomas through the countryside.
Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his
American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that
before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and
would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better"
direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased
his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. Disciplined by the
austere biblical notion that a man, having put his hand to the plow, should
not look back, Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what
might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a
road he had been taught to avoid. In a reminiscent mood, not very long after
his return to America as a successful, newly discovered poet, Frost
pretended to "carry himself" in the manner of Edward Thomas just long enough
to write "The Road Not Taken." Immediately, [end of page xiv] he sent a
manuscript copy of the poem to Thomas, without comment, and yet with the
expectation that his friend would notice how the poem pivots ironically on
the un-Frostian phrase, "I shall be telling this with a sigh." As it turned
out Frost's expectations were disappointed. Thomas missed the gentle jest
because the irony had been handled too slyly, too subtly.
A short time later, when "The Road Not Taken" was published in the Atlantic
Monthly for August 1915, Frost hoped that some of his American readers would
recognize the pivotal irony of the poem; but again he was disappointed.
Self-defensively he began to drop hints as he read "The Road Not Taken"
before public audiences. On one occasion he told of receiving a letter from
a grammar-school girl who asked a good question of him: "Why the sigh?" That
letter and that question, he said, had prompted an answer. End of the hint.
On another occasion, after another public reading of "The Road Not Taken,"
he gave more pointed warnings: "You have to be careful of that one; it's a
tricky poem—very tricky."
—Lawrance Thompson, "Introduction," Selected
Letters of Robert Frost, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.
The
Figure a Poem Makes
Granted no one but
a humanist much cares how sound a poem is if it is only a sound. The sound
is the gold in the ore. Then we will have the sound out alone and dispense
with the inessential. We do till we make the discovery that the object in
writing poetry is to make all poems sound as different as possible from
each other, and the resources for that of vowels, consonants, punctuation,
syntax, words, sentences, metre are not enough. We need the help of
context- meaning-subject matter. That is the greatest help towards
variety. All that can be done with words is soon told. So also with
metres-particularly in our language where there are virtually but two,
strict iambic and loose iambic. The ancients with many were still poor if
they depended on metres for all tune. It is painful to watch our
sprung-rhythmists straining at the point of omitting one short from a foot
for relief from monotony. The possibilities for tune from the dramatic
tones of meaning struck across the rigidity of a limited metre are
endless. And we are back in poetry as merely one more art of having
something to say, sound or unsound. Probably better if sound, because
deeper and from wider experience.
Then there is this wildness whereof it is spoken. Granted again that it
has an equal claim with sound to being a poem's better half. If it is a
wild tune, it is a Poem. [...]
It should be of the
pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It
begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love.
No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still
in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes
direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events,
and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification,
such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against
confusion. It has denouement. It has an outcome that though unforeseen was
predestined from the first image of the original mood-and indeed from the
very mood. [...]
[...]
A schoolboy may be
defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he
learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some
previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a
ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic. More than
once I should have lost my soul to radicalism if it had been the
originality it was mistaken for by its young converts. [...] For myself
the originality need be no more than the freshness of a poem run in the
way I have described: from delight to wisdom. The figure is the same as
for love. Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own
melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be
worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run
itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will
forever keep its freshness as a petal keeps its fragrance. It can never
lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.
—Robert
Frost, "The
Figure a Poem Makes," The
Collected Prose of Robert Frost, ed. Mark Richardson (Cambridge:
Belknap, 2007): 131–33.
Study Questions
In what ways are the two roads
the same? Different?
What does the poem say about
memory?
How well does "The Road Not
Taken" fulfill the idea about poetry that Frost describes in
"The Figure a Poem Makes"?
Vocabulary
diction;
denotation, connotation
meter
rhyme
scheme
rhyme
repetition
stanza
imagery
symbol
enjambment
irony
tone
Sample Student
Responses to Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"
Response 1:
Study Question:
Student Name
2202234
Introduction to the Study of English Literature
Acharn Puckpan
Tipayamontri
June 12, 2010
Reading
Response 1
Title
Text.
Reference
Frost, Robert. “The Road Not
Taken.” Complete Poems of Robert Frost. Rinehart and Winston,
1964, p. 131.
Links
Robert Frost,
"The
Road Not Taken," The Poetry of Robert Frost,
ed. Edward Connery Lathem (1970; text of the poem with
audio clip of Frost reading, 1:04 min.)