Sunday, May 08, 2005

A tortuous road

I've never gotten along particularly well with U.S. literature. I don't know why it is. A defect in my character? Bad early teaching? This little essay, at least, has saved a poem by Robert Frost for me. Now I can find it amusing.

From “Satire: That Blasted Art,” edited by John R. Clark and Anna Lydia Motto (New York: 1973), pp. 17-18.
THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

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;

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 woods diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Indisputably a charter member in that dubious class, “Best-Loved Poems of the American People,” Frost’s Road work has been constantly anthologized — and consistently misunderstood. American Romantic lyrics in the nineteenth century often trumpet noises about affirmative individualism, after the manner of Tennyson’s “Ulysses” and kin to the many road-of-life poems popularized by Longfellow. After a first reading, the reader might feel that Frost’s creation positively deserves consignment to this genre: His poem is exalted, often enough, as a chest-thumping (if slightly sentimental) affirmation of unique individualism electing the private footpath — a footpath by the bye that turns out to be the audience’s popular superhighway. However, more careful scrutiny of the poem wil reveal it to be, instead, a powerful parodic defection from that tradition which applauds singularity, rather than being its avatar.

The poem’s last line raises our first question. It has an assurance about it that might at first put us off; but it is markedly foggy and ambiguous. What difference has been made? we might well ask. We might also recollect similar fuzzy endings in other romantic lyrics. Is Robert Frost victor or victim in this romantic tradition?

Additional readings of the poem should leave no doubt about Frost’s ironic intention and control. For the elemental question is, when all is said, whether the speaker ever did take the less-traveled road. Another perusal of the middle stanzas provides the answer: no. Comically enough, that other road is embarrassingly similar to its mate. For, although the one “perhaps” had a better claim to being less traveled, yet
... 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.

This is no medieval romance — where all forks in the road are as morally distinct as a pikestaff. (Knights always turn to the right — that road promising to be the highroad. The left, usually through foul and dark woods, is always “sinister.”) And, as a matter of fact, Frost’s very title calls attention not to the road selected, but to this other “equal” pathway that never was negotiated!

As a stroke, Frost’s poem assumes new meanings that transcend any easy morality or happy romantic bliss. His poem acutely studies the psychology of the chooser. Hypothetically, he realizes that, in the distant future, he wil have “modified,” “shaped” the story of his life. In such a sentimental world, he will be forcefully motivated to tell his future audience (and to believe it himself!) that his choice long ago had been deliberate and meaningful — when of course it was not. Frost’s poem, then, by approaching conventional patterns and themes only to violate them, achieves a level of insight into man’s nature that the soft, cheery sentimental poetry of inner-directed men seldom attains. The poem is significant just because it does flirt with conventions, play with themes, and tease our fond traditions. It is a slight poem, surely, a small lyric sung in playful numbers, but that does not prevent its satiric gaming from helping it achieve a high order of perception.
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17. Cf. the conclusion of Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways”: “But she is in her grave, and, oh,/ The difference to me!” For rather bold assertions of one’s control over one’s destiny, see Clough’s “Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth,” Henley’s “Invictus,” Arnold’s “Prospice.”

18. The Latin for “left” is in fact sinister.

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