"DAVID ORR: He claims that he wrote it because he used to go on walks with the English poet Edward Thomas, because Frost spent a brief time in England. It was actually the beginning of his career as a poet.
And what he would like to say at readings afterward is that he and Thomas would go on these walks, and then Thomas, who has a somewhat more romantic sensibility than Frost, Thomas would always regret whatever path they had taken.
And then afterward, he would say, well, we really should have gone to the right. I could have shown you something over there. We should have gone to the left. I could show you something over there.
And Frost was very amused by this. And so he wrote the poem as a kind of joke at his friend’s expense."
In other words, it's more about regret than making the right choice, or that you deceive yourself sometimes by dwelling on a choice that is actually perfectly random. Or a million other interpretations...
Thanks for that! Much more informative than the article. I think the rest of the commentary is important too. Like the original article says, poems are meant to be interpreted, and I think Frost played with the words to encourage different interpretations, even the literal reading of the last few lines out of context.
The poem is essentially a commentary on interpretation. There's the initial evaluation of the paths, evaluation along the path, and an evaulation of future evaluations, showing how those interpretations change over time. The initial evaluation is that the less worn one might be more interesting. During the walk, there's the interpretation that they're probably both the same, and an evaluation of future evaluation, emphasizing the importance of the choice and implying self-deception.
I think this follows the actual propagation of consequences according to chaos theory. At the moment when a choice is made, the effects are relatively small, but we all know that long-term effects of those minor differences cause large divergences in the future. So there's an actual element of truth to the final evaluation, even though it's considered as self-deception, because of the passage of time and repeated self-interpretation of the choice, even if the roads were about the same.
Essentially, the choice itself is consequential, even if the immediate results of the choice are not.
On Easter Monday, 1917, the first day of the Arras Offensive, he paused for a moment to fill his pipe. A shell passed so close to him that the blast of air stopped his heart; he died without a mark on his body.
Thomas was an astonishing thing, an established literary critic who suddenly morphed into a great poet. All his poems were written in the three years before he died, and he kept getting better. The Other is hauntingly good: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/239754. WWI famously killed many poets, but I wish Thomas hadn't been one of them. He had pure English in his veins, and I like him better than Frost.
To spare the feelings of his widow Helen, she was told the fiction of a "bloodless death" i.e. that Thomas was killed by the concussive blast wave of one of the last shells fired as he stood to light his pipe and that there was no mark on his body. However, a letter from his commanding officer Franklin Lushington written in 1936 (and discovered many years later in an American archive) states that in reality the cause of Thomas' death was due to being "shot clean through the chest".
It's interesting what people like. I've never been able to identify well with WWI poets. This is a good example. It's clearly well-written: the opening stanza captures me and takes me back to times hiking, when you emerge from the trees and the sunlight. But the rest is just something I can't understand or identify with. Perhaps it was intended to feel alienating, but it doesn't make me feel anything, not even alienated. It's just there, a thing I'm not that interested in.
I'm not criticizing your taste, by the way: I think everyone is entitled to look for what they want in art. I'm just interested in what you see here.
If the main idea of the poem—a man who follows a strange version of himself through the countryside—doesn't resonate with you, then yeah there probably isn't much of interest there. But I find it haunting and mysterious.
Then there is the melody of the language and the original way he puts words together that sounds modern and old-fashioned at the same time. And how he can write about nature in a way that brings it to life, which is super rare—most nature writing is boring, and the way Thomas does it seems full of feeling, something that was about to fall out of modern poetry. And then it's just perfectly executed, except I wish he hadn't rhymed "mirth" with "earth".
To me that poem suggests a modernism that was possible but in the end never happened. I like Eliot and Pound, but their virtuosity is altogether different and they are far more detached and alienated. Of course we can't say what Thomas would have been like after WWI, which had a shattering effect on all art.
You're certainly right that we needn't all like the same things. Thanks for sharing those links. I admire the Elizabeth Bishop poem for its construction—it's clever how the middle lines all rhyme—but I'm somehow not convinced she means what she's saying. The Billy Collins poem is beautiful, though. Thanks!
But it doesn't have to necessarily make you identify with it at first glance.
I, for example, enjoy how the poem captivates with its poetic form and how it makes you search for meaning (in its parts and as a whole). I think just the prosody and the process of finding meaning in the poem are enjoyable enough to call it beautiful.
I'm not dang but this is how I feel about The Other.
Thank you for posting this. Fine work. I need to give it another read later, but for now, I find Thomas' iambs a little heavyweight. Every line has the same 4x(ba-DUM, ba-DUM) rhythm, with almost no variety. Frost has a lighter touch with meter.
Now that's what I call 'meta'! In a discussion about an article about a poem, you are saying that the article isn't actually about the poem but about what the public thinks about the poem...
This seems to happen a lot with Robert Frost poems... "Mending Wall" seems to be about enjoying working alongside a neighbor to fix their stone wall, but it's really more of a lament about the walls people build between each other.
This one time at the library, I picked up a Frost anthology with commentary and skimmed it for about 30 minutes. The main thrust I took away from the author's commentary was that Frost was notorious for his sense of sarcasm. It was sort of his shtick. But he was so subtle about it, he often lamented that nobody recognized his genius.
I had an English professor who also held a congruent opinion of Frost. He said that during Frost's own lifetime, academics and plebs alike heralded him as this wise, folksy, american farmer. They adored him. Then a few decades after he died, academia reread Frost's poems and said "Holy cow, these are actually pretty depressing."
however, if I were to ignore the backstory just for fun and apply the law of logic to the poem wording, given the information the road not taken are both, since the poem state he's taken the less used road and the two road ahead are equally worn, he got back to the road he came from. (and by necessity more people went to the crossroad from the other two roads and left on the other road without going to the road the writer is coming from)
Eh, this debate has been over in literary criticism circles, not because anybody has particularly convinced everyone, but because the debate isn't that interesting. You're taking the perspective of T.S. Eliot and other New Critics.
"Yet it’s also not quite right to say that the poem is merely a knowing literary joke disguised as shopworn magazine verse that has somehow managed to fool millions of readers for a hundred years."
This is an often-seen case, I think. People have a concept in their head they want to see attached to a popular saying and when along comes something that kind of fits the bill, it gets used as the bearer of the message, regardless of its actual original intent. More mutated examples are proverbs like "the proof is in the pudding" and "the exception that proves the rule", which express concepts people want expressed and attached to easily recognizable sentences. Nobody really reads the poem, they just hear the words and the popular concept attached to them. You can probably find a lot more examples like that.
"DAVID ORR: He claims that he wrote it because he used to go on walks with the English poet Edward Thomas, because Frost spent a brief time in England. It was actually the beginning of his career as a poet.
And what he would like to say at readings afterward is that he and Thomas would go on these walks, and then Thomas, who has a somewhat more romantic sensibility than Frost, Thomas would always regret whatever path they had taken.
And then afterward, he would say, well, we really should have gone to the right. I could have shown you something over there. We should have gone to the left. I could show you something over there.
And Frost was very amused by this. And so he wrote the poem as a kind of joke at his friend’s expense."
In other words, it's more about regret than making the right choice, or that you deceive yourself sometimes by dwelling on a choice that is actually perfectly random. Or a million other interpretations...