David Orr Suggests Another Reading for 'The Road Not Taken'
David Orr writes for Lit Hub about Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." Have we been reading it wrong? Probably, says Orr. More:
According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost had been inspired to write the poem by Thomas’s habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside—an impulse that Frost equated with the romantic predisposition for “crying over what might have been.” Frost, Thompson writes, believed that his friend “would take the poem as a gentle joke and would protest, ‘Stop teasing me.’”
That wasn’t what occurred. Instead, Thomas sent Frost an admiring note in which it was evident that he had assumed the poem’s speaker was a version of Frost, and that the final line was meant to be read as generations of high school valedictorians have assumed. The sequence of their correspondence on the poem is a miniature version of the confusion “The Road Not Taken” would provoke in millions of subsequent readers:
1. Frost sends the poem to Thomas, with no clarifying text, in March or April of 1915.
2. Thomas responds shortly thereafter in a letter now evidently lost but referred to in later correspondence, calling the poem “staggering” but missing Frost’s intention.
3. Frost responds in a letter (the date is unclear) to ask Thomas for further comment on the poem, hoping to hear that Thomas understood that it was at least in part addressing his own behavior.
4. Thomas responds in a letter dated June 13, 1915, explaining that “the simple words and unemphatic rhythms were not such as I was accustomed to expect great things, things I like, from. It staggered me to think that perhaps I had always missed what made poetry poetry.” It’s still clear that Thomas doesn’t quite understand the poem’s stance or Frost’s “joke” at his expense.
5. Frost writes back on June 26, 1915: “Methinks thou strikest too hard in so small a matter. A tap would have settled my poem. I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh [in line 16] was a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the I don’t suppose I was ever sorry for any thing I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel.”
6. Thomas responds on July 11, 1915: “You have got me again over the Path not taken & no mistake . . . I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.”
Edward Thomas was one of the keenest literary thinkers of his time, and the poem was meant to capture aspects of his own personality and past. Yet even Thomas needed explicit instructions—indeed, six entire letters—in order to appreciate the series of double games played in “The Road Not Taken.”
Read on here.