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The chilling truth about Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken, America’s favourite poem
150 years after his birth, Frost’s poetry has brought comfort to millions. But have we all been missing its true meaning?
Be honest: what was the last contemporary poem you learnt by heart, just because it spoke directly to you? Perhaps it’s simply the case that fewer such poems are being written. Open any prize-winning collection these days, and there’s a high chance you’ll find someone banging on about themselves; a newcomer to the art form might reasonably conclude that poetry now is less about memorable truth-telling than the pained demonstration of the authenticity of the poet’s own experience. The sesquicentennial of Robert Frost, the American poet born on March 26 1874, seems a good moment to remind ourselves that poetry used to aspire to a great deal more.
Frost’s very clear idea of poetry as a public art means that his poems are about you. He knew that readers are interested in the poet’s life only insofar as it can shed light on their own. But Frost also used our perfectly natural instinct “to make it all about us” to trick us into serious misreadings of his own intentions. His poems affect to give us what we most want – comfort, logic, reassurance, familiarity, simplicity; but they are almost always far more strange, ambiguous, dark or nihilistic than they first appear.
Frost is a poet both of authentic voice and of meticulous, sly performance. His cleverest and most virtuosic trick was to naturalise his poetic speech in a way that lets it travel into the brain along the same road as the conversational. The checkpoint guards at our ear miss everything, as Frost cheerfully volunteers his paperwork, declares his animal products and chats away about the weather, while he smuggles yet another caseload of God-help-us-all over the border. But here’s where you can trust Frost: nothing he says is an accident, however casual its delivery. Indeed, you soon learn that the more throwaway a line appears, the more important it will later turn out to be.
“The Road Not Taken” has become the best-known example of Frost’s subversive tactics, yet it’s remarkable how many readers still fall into Frost’s rusty old trap, more than a century after its publication. The poem pretends to be another fireside monologue, but is really a firebombing of the false comfort of the “life is a journey” metaphor. Such is our need to make the poem mean what we want it to mean, even the title is often misquoted as “The Road Less Travelled”.
Yet the poem is not about making a bold choice at a diverging path, but retrospective justification: for our lives to have meaning, we often have to tell ourselves our decisions were both crucial and consciously our own. “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.” But did it, really? How can we know? (And nowhere, note, does Frost reassure us that the “difference” made was a good one.) The poem earlier admitted that two paths were “worn… about the same”. Your interpretation of that “sigh” will tell you a lot about yourself: what do you hear in it? Courage? Satisfaction? Resignation? Regret? Frost intended it as the sigh of a rather pompous old man, determined to see himself the master of his own fate. But our heroic journey is a distortion of the rear-view mirror.
The poem was written partly to mock his friend Edward Thomas, who could be a wretchedly indecisive walking companion. Ironically, it seems to have tipped Thomas the other way: he soon made a bold choice of his own, believing – mistakenly – that for him “all roads lead to France” (and to his almost immediate death in action, on arriving at Arras, in April 1917). Thomas failed to recognise himself in the poem, and Frost had to point out the joke, even though it took half-a-dozen letters for Thomas to get it. When he finally did, he was annoyed. “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.” Maybe so, but the story shows that the best of us can be misdirected by such expert sleight of hand, and for decades this poem – a favourite with everyone from school valedictorians to advertising copywriters, and even taught in China as a bold allegory on choosing the one true path of Maoism – has gone on using our own vanity against us. Too well, perhaps: the poem was once memorably described as “reader-proof”.
My favourite Frostian abyss comes at the end of “Design”, a poem about nature’s absolute lack of it. Frost’s depictions of the natural world can take your breath away like a Cézanne: look at the aftermath of the ice-storm in “Birches” – “such heaps of broken glass to sweep away / you’d think the inner dome of heaven had fallen”. But he never succumbs to the lazy comforts of the appeal to nature. Nature is both beautiful and terrible, and our human role within nature is to make precisely that observation.
In “Design”, Frost comes across a horrible little vignette in the undergrowth. A blue flower has been made white by a genetic mutation, and it accidentally provides camouflage for a fat white spider, which plucks an innocent white moth from the air. The tiny scene is described like something from Titus Andronicus. Frost is saying: so, you want to believe the universe is a deliberate creation? Fine. But if you do, you’ll have to accept that it has been designed by a demon: “What but design of darkness to appal?”
Lord, if ever you wanted a sonnet to end on its penultimate line, this is it. Beware the shrugged afterthoughts of Robert Frost: “If design govern in a thing so small.” I remember turning cold the first time I realised what he meant. What we see in this little knee-height horror show is just the nature of physical law. And the rules that govern us turn out to be an amoral and murderous enormity: our cosmos has evil written into its code, by accident. One finishes the poem desperate for the demon-designer of the previous line to come back: at least Satan took an interest in us. No, says Frost: we’re alone here.
Which is not to say Frost doesn’t give comfort and hope. He just refuses to lie to you while doing so. “The Master Speed” is a better and more adaptable wedding poem than Shakespeare’s more popular sonnet, “Let me not to the marriage of true minds”, which, I can assure you, you do not want to read in its original context. (That sonnet would serve better to seal the civil partnership of two gay men, one of whom is in jail.)
Frost’s poem is made more moving by his being more honest: “And you were given this swiftness, not for haste / Nor chiefly that you may go where you will, / But in the rush of everything to waste, / That you may have the power of standing still –”. His idea that our human role is to hold our ground against “the rush of everything to waste” is given an astonishing exposition in “West-Running Brook”, a poem of such prophetic force that it gives mansplaining a good name, and seems to anticipate the idea of emergence theory in physics by many years.
We are, Frost says, that part of nature which goes against nature, and its headlong drive to entropy: “The universal cataract of death / That spends to nothingness – and unresisted, / Save by some strange resistance in itself, / Not just a swerving, but a throwing back, / As if regret were in it and were sacred.” The human as the “sacred regret” in the grand, if random, scheme of things makes some fine, assuaging and comforting sense of our walking paradox: an animal whose capacity for love speaks of the universe’s origin in unity, watching as everything flies apart.
Frost’s poems remain mirrors to the human heart, and mirrors are timeless – which is just as well, given his poems wouldn’t win a commendation in a poetry competition these days. But for all the hells that can open up below the surface of his poems, his larger point is that our work here should be beautiful; unlike nature, we get to exercise some choice in the matter. His “… long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree / Toward heaven still”, and the golden fruit of his poems is still ours for the taking.
Don Paterson’s latest collection is The Arctic (Faber, £10.99)