And that had made all the difference in his life. Two roads diverged in a forest and he took the one which had been traveled less by the people. The poet feels that ages from now he would be telling others with a sigh about the choice he made. He doubted whether he would ever come back to walk on the other road. The poet kept the first road for another day knowing well how one way leads on to another. That morning, both the roads lay equally covered with yellow leaves which had not been trodden much by the travelers. However, as far as passing was concerned, both the roads had been worn equally. Robert Frost: Poems Summary and Analysis of 'The Road Not Taken' (1916) The narrator comes upon a fork in the road while walking through a yellow wood. Moreover, it had a better claim to be walked upon. He could see it up to a point where it turned to the undergrowth and disappeared. He looked down one road as far as he could see. ![]() He regretted that he could not travel on both roads. Two roads diverged in two different directions. ![]() He will claim that he took the less-traveled road. And he admits that someday in the future, he will recreate the scene with a slight twist. Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other on some another day. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with untrodden leaves. If Frost’s most famous poem is representative, and if Orr is right about it, we should see Frost not as the earnest Yankee sage beloved by junior high school teachers or the dark jokester expounded by college professors, but as an artist able to evoke and clarify the conflicts that follow from the ways we think we understand ourselves.The poet stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. This holds for the poet as well as the poem. Orr - who writes the On Poetry column for the Book Review - is the first person to argue this at length for a popular audience, and he’s persuasive enough to give us good reason to hope that his interpretation will lodge a toehold in conventional wisdom. The options “blur and merge,” Orr writes they are “like overlapping ghosts.” As he evocatively puts it, “Two potential poems revolve around each other, separating and overlapping like clouds in a way that leaves neither reading perfectly visible.” It might have changed him deeply, it might not have. His decision might have been arbitrary, it might have been meaningful. It doesn’t accept or reject its myth of choice but sets us up to feel the tensions involved in having to choose, as if each reader were the traveler. Yet according to the corrective that David Orr offers in “The Road Not Taken,” his new book-length analysis, the poem is neither an ode nor a dark joke but somehow both at once. ![]() It was an arbitrary choice, this national myth of choosing independently and bravely and becoming the sum of your choices or finding yourself. The other looked as grassy, as trodden, as easy or hard or distinctive. The traveler hasn’t been changed by his choice of a long and lonely road, but tells us that he’s going to tell that story when he’s older, even though he had no particular reason to choose the road he took. As interpreted in The New Yorker or “Orange Is the New Black,” the poem is not in fact an ode to individualism but a joke at the expense of individualist hokum. Most of us have also heard the story that says this is all bunk. That poem is “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost, and its subject is familiar to most of us who attended an American or a Yankophilic middle school at some point in the last century: A traveler comes to a fork in the woods and, after sweating over his direction in life, takes the road less traveled, and it makes all the difference. David Orr has written the best popular explanation to date of the most popular poem in American history.
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