About

While in school, I came across this famous (and notorious) poem by Robert Frost. As happens with teenagers undecided about their future, I felt the poem called out to me. Frost was prodding me to take the road less traveled by. And that sentiment affected my decisions throughout my adolescence. Every time I faced a decision, I thought of Frost and took the less popular route. As did Edward Thomas, I guess.

Thomas and Frost were close friends, and walking partners too, from Frost’s time spent in England. After returning to America in 1915, Frost sent Thomas an advance copy of this poem and Thomas, like me, took it seriously and personally. Despite being a mature married man who could have avoided conscription, Thomas enlisted in World War 1 and was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.

Years later, I read that Frost had intended the poem not to be a solution to indecision but a mockery of it, inspired by Thomas’ frequent indecision on their walks. Having written a poem about the futility of regret and then losing a friend due to its misinterpretation, Frost perhaps (quite ironically) regretted it.

The poem wasn’t as much calling out to me, I realised, as calling me out.

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, 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.