[repost dari ning, 17 Juni 2021]

If you like poetry, chances are you’ve heard of Robert Frost’s most famous poem—The Road Not Taken. There are many famous poems, poems quoted every once in a while by most people. But this poem is quoted very often, especially the last lines. The poem goes like this:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, 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 travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

It is indeed very well-known, yet almost always misinterpreted. The most commonly quoted verse is the final one, which just so happens to be rather ambiguous when taken without context. This interpretation says that, in order to grow and flourish, we must be adventurous and take the ‘road not taken’. We must be brave enough to take this road, no matter what the general public thinks. We must learn to take risks and follow our dreams.

But if you read the preceeding verses carefully, you might notice something else, a road away from said deciphering. I found a more thorough explanation in this video. But it all boils down to this: the narrator, the ‘I’ in the poem, seems like an indesicive person. This is clear in several lines of the poem. ‘And having perhaps the better claim,’ is one example. ‘Though as for that…’ is another one. Usage of words like ‘perhaps’ makes it evident that the narrator isn’t so sure himself.

He even says that the other road is ‘just as fair’ and that ‘the passing there/Had worn them really about the same’. Both these roads are identical. It doesn’t matter which road he takes. The final verse, the commonly quoted verse, makes his indecisiveness all the more apparent. The whole verse is about the narrator overthinking his decision and ‘telling this with a sigh’. He believes that the decision he has made resulted in where he is now. There’s a sense of longing and curiosity from him for the other road—the road he didn’t take. He laments about what he has missed, even though he himself stated that both roads were the same.

But what is truly interesting is how this poem ties with the death of Edward Thomas, one of my favourite poets besides Frost. An in-depth story of this can be read in this Guardian article.

Frost grew up in New England, but he moved to Great Britain in 1912. Here, he met Thomas. At the time, they were both trying to make a living as poets. They grew extremely close to each other and would enjoy walks together in the nature.

Then the war came in 1914. Though they didn’t know it at the time, it would eventually seperate them. But the walks in the nature continued. Frost observed Thomas’s indesiciveness, and it inspired him to write Two Roads, later renamed The Road Not Taken. It was Frost’s friendly, gentle way of mocking Thomas. Yet Thomas took it too seriously. Previous events had made him guilty about not enlisting in the war. He wrote a poem titled ‘Roads’, inspired by The Road Not Taken. A line in his poem said, ‘now all roads lead to France’. So to France he went. Even though Thomas was 37 at the time, therefore able to avoid enlisting, he enlisted. He was eventually killed in Arras, France in April 1917. I haven’t found any sources about Frost’s reaction.

All that said, this interpretation is by no means fully ‘correct’. Poetry, like all art, is open to any interpretation and there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. We can’t call out people for using the quote in greeting cards or motivation videos. Honestly, the common interpretation of the poem is motivational and true. But it is still very interesting to know the story behind the poem. I myself was surprised to read about it, especially since the quote is one of my mother’s favourites. I shared this story with her and she may have been a little disappointed.