The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost: Reading Group example poem for Adlington Library.

Isn’t this poem immediately involving and doesn’t it grip at something almost physical or visceral when we read it?

Does it connect us with what we acknowledge in private or under stressful conditions perhaps,  but on a daily basis may just  keep quiet about? 

Reading the poem out aloud  seems to enhance its power to move us, placing us at Frost’s resonant fork in  the road, reminding us of our power to choose and of the effects of such choices.

When we listen to the poem’s sounds, we ‘hear’ a rhythm or pulse that resembles  LIFE! 

Doesn’t the poem  capture  the irony of remembrance and our sometimes sense of a parallel, yet unlived other life:  a road through a  life not directly experienced , yet taken in other ways, through imagination, fantasy or even regret?  Our capacity to reflect upon ‘what if?’

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, 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,

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 traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

 

So maybe it’s about our choices and how our life maybe being haunted though not
negatively necessarily by the seemingly parallel life we may have lived out
in imagination somewhere – elsewhere?