As the new year approaches and the roads of our past and future spread out before us, I thought we should go back to Frost for the last poem of the year.
Special treat! Click on the audio for a recording of Frost reciting his poem and think about “why,” as my good friend Susan Dentzer would ask, “did Frost call the poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ as opposed to ‘The Road Less Traveled?”
Happy New Year!
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry that 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
Yet 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 onto way,
I doubted that 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.
Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening