Why A Typical Screwed-Up Reading of a Poem Will Turn You into a Pathetic, Lonely Hobo

It has pained me (well, that’s kind of melodramatic) over the years to hear people praise Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” as some kind of anthem for nonconformity. If you want nonconformity, read the Beats. Anyway, people take the last two lines of the poem, “I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference,” and they turn it into the whole poem. In fact, if you Googled “the road less traveled,” you would find the first references to be mistakes about the titles of Frost’s poem, instead of links to the book written in the 1970s by M. Scott Peck.

Here’s the poem, and below each stanza, a brief “what’s happening.”

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;

Ok, so dude is walking in the woods, comes to a fork in the road, wants to go down both paths, can’t, so he takes a closer look at one of them.

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,

After checking out one path, dude checks out the other, judges it to be a little grassier, but realizes that it’s pretty much the same as the other path.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Dude decides to take the one he looked at on second glance, but would like to take the first path, too. Figures he’s probably not really going to, though, because we all know how way leads on to way (all we have to do is start following hyperlinks to see the truth in that little statement).

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.

And so, with a sigh, he shall tell one day how that choice, the path for which “the passing there Had worn them really about the same,” has made all the difference. He doesn’t tell us what kind of difference, just that there is a difference.

Now you can project all you want to on the poem, but that doesn’t mean it’s about not following everyone else. There is a lot of information out there about how Frost was playing games with this poem, and there is a lot out there that starts with the idea and then twists the poem to fit the idea.

So why does this matter? Why can’t a poem be what you want it to be and let everyone else worry about their own problems? I think I have an answer. You connect to a text – be it a song, a novel, a poem or anything else – because it helps you make meaning of your experience. If you connect to a text that has a flimsy connection, or a mistaken connection, then it’s a house of cards thing, or maybe it’s like finding the guy or girl you think is right for you, but no, not really. And you try to make it work, but the relationship is more of a struggle than a joy.

You’re better off continuing your search to find the right connection, because that poem, that song, that person, will be a consistent, reliable source of comfort. And that’s my argument about why reading a poem accurately matters.

You may be interested to know that this poem has a rating of 9.3 out of 10 on poemhunter.com. I guess the question is whether this poem was hot or not.