Upon further reflection about this post and Frost's poem, I suddenly realized: Wait a minute! What's with the title!? How does it make sense? The poem's NOT about a road not taken, it's about the road the speaker HAS taken. Now, allegedly, the road has been "less" taken by others before the speaker takes it, but still, the road in question, the road the poem claims to be focused on, has been taken. The only "not taken" road is the supposedly more-travelled road the speaker avoids when he chooses to take the (again, allegedly) less-traveled road. As such, purely for accuracy's sake, the title really should be something like "The Road Less Taken." However, Frost not only understood the importance of endings, he also apparently was keenly aware of how important titles are, too, and "The Road Less Taken" is just not as "punchy" as "The Road Not Taken." But added punch does not equal added sense. In fact, I can't resist using the Negative Slam (use your best "Wayne's World" voice): "This poem is called 'The Road Not Taken.' And it's about the road not taken. . . . NOT!" [And now I wonder why Frost didn't title the poem "The Road Less Traveled" in the first place? It makes more sense; 'Traveled' seems to be (to me, at least) more evocative, and--dare I say it?--more poetic than 'Taken'; it's already in the poem. . . . hmmm, maybe that's the reason: Frost didn't want to reveal his "breathless lightning bolt of a conclusion" so early in the game. Still, why have a title that lies about what lies ahead? Just more Frostian deviousness?]
Your commentary on the ending (and middle and beginning) of Frost's "The Road Not Taken" reminds me of another Frost poem with a famous ending: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I'm guessing that if "The Road Not Taken" is Frost's most well-known poem, then surely "Stopping by Woods" must be the second most-recognized of his oeuvre. And even non-specialist readers are struck by its ending in which the penultimate line is repeated and therefore (also) becomes the final line: "And miles to go before I sleep."
My high school debate coach, Jan Reed, was an English teacher by day and I still vividly recall her take on this poem's conclusion. To provide some context, I probably should explain that Mrs. Reed was decidedly "blue-collar" in her approach to literature. That is, she had no patience for hoity-toity elitist academic critics and their theories and their desperate searches for the "deeper meanings" behind a poem's supposed symbols and the like; no, she was a champion of "common sense" and straight-forward readings. One day Mrs. Reed and I were talking about something (I forget what exactly) and she began a mini-rant about the ending of "Stopping by Woods." With obvious disdain bordering on contempt, Mrs. Reed told me something like, "When I was in school and being taught this poem, there were all these critics and professors going on and on about the 'significance' of that repeated line at the end, all this blather about mortality and death and blah blah blah, when it's clear to me that Robert Frost simply just ran out of rhymes." As I was just 18 years old at the time and my only real investment in poetry consisted of writing sad rip-offs of Richard Brautigan's rip-offs of Japanese haiku, I had no way of gauging how accurate Mrs. Reed's assessment of this poem's ending actually was. It's possible I hadn't even encountered Frost's poem yet. Regardless, I recall adopting Mrs. Reed's explanation for the poem's ending as my own and imagined that by doing so I was striking a blow for "sensible" readings, while scoffing at the tortured interpretations of the egghead professoriate.
Years later, after spending a lot of time being trained to become a member of that egghead professoriate and having spent an equal amount of time trying to learn how to write poetry, I realized that Mrs. Reed's understanding of Frost's poem and its ending was flawed. Let me explain how. But first, here's Frost's poem, all 16 compact lines of it:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Frost employs a 4-line version of Dante's terza rima, in which the terminal word of a central line of one stanza is rhymed by end-words in the next stanza. The rhyme scheme for this poem can be mapped like this: a-a-b-a / b-b-c-b / c-c-d-c / d-d-d-d. The "problem" with such interlocking rhyme schemes is how to bring them to a close since every stanza contains an element that is supposed to be echoed in the next stanza. But what if there is no next stanza, no place for a rhyme word introduced in one stanza to be mirrored in the following one? Dante's solution was to close off a string of terza rima stanzas with a rhymed couplet. Frost does something similar by concluding with a rime royal couplet in which an entire line rhymes with itself. But Frost didn't choose to conclude his poem this way because he ran out rhyme: even a cursory examination of the poem should prove that.
Mrs. Reed assumed that Frost couldn't come up with another satisfactory -eep rhyme and therefore decided to repeat "sleep." A casual inquiry to the omniscient Google reveals that there are at least 177 -eep rhymes to choose from, so I'm skeptical Frost lacked the resources to include another -eep word. And besides, and most importantly, Frost didn't 'need' another -eep rhyme in the first place. That third line of the fourth stanza, were he to continue following the formal strategy he'd established, should have been some other rhyme-sound entirely, an 'e'-rhyme nesting in between the three -eep 'd'-rhymes. And that was Frost's real issue: how should he end that fourth stanza's third line? If he followed the pattern he'd set up in the first three stanzas, the end-word of that third line would either be an orphan (with no brothers or sisters to be found, since a fifth stanza would not be written) or it would have to rhyme with a word that appeared in a previous stanza, probably the first, making the poem circle back to its beginnings. Had Frost chosen that route, he wouldn't be seeking an -eep rhyme but rather an 'o' rhyme. And, c'mon, we can't pretend that Frost had run out of 'o' rhymes. Indulge me now as I engage in a profound act of hubris by proposing an alternative penultimate line that would fulfill the requirements of this 'circular' strategy:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep
(Crops to harvest and seeds to sow),
And miles to go before I sleep.
Yeah, yeah, there are several reasons this proposed line sucks bilge water, not the least being that harvesting and planting are not winter activities; plus, the parenthetical rendering does not seem particularly Frost-like. But in my line's defense, this stanza is very future-oriented--the promises, the miles yet to be traveled--and so talking about future agriculture (with all the possible symbolic meanings that could be wrung from such activity) seemed . . . well, defensible. Mostly what my proposed revision demonstrates is how absolutely right Frost was when he chose to conclude his poem by ignoring a formal requirement he'd put in place and then--audaciously, in my opinion--simply repeating a line that already had finality inscribed in its DNA, making final even more final. And with all due respect to Mrs. Reed, the critics and professors she disparaged were right: repeating the line does change its meaning and, by extension, the meaning of the entire poem. A statement of physical fact ("miles to go") is infused with a metaphysicality not present before the repetition: the statement has been transformed into metaphor, and that transformation transports the poem into an entirely new realm of interpretive possibilities.
At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Upon further reflection about this post and Frost's poem, I suddenly realized: Wait a minute! What's with the title!? How does it make sense? The poem's NOT about a road not taken, it's about the road the speaker HAS taken. Now, allegedly, the road has been "less" taken by others before the speaker takes it, but still, the road in question, the road the poem claims to be focused on, has been taken. The only "not taken" road is the supposedly more-travelled road the speaker avoids when he chooses to take the (again, allegedly) less-traveled road. As such, purely for accuracy's sake, the title really should be something like "The Road Less Taken." However, Frost not only understood the importance of endings, he also apparently was keenly aware of how important titles are, too, and "The Road Less Taken" is just not as "punchy" as "The Road Not Taken." But added punch does not equal added sense. In fact, I can't resist using the Negative Slam (use your best "Wayne's World" voice): "This poem is called 'The Road Not Taken.' And it's about the road not taken. . . . NOT!" [And now I wonder why Frost didn't title the poem "The Road Less Traveled" in the first place? It makes more sense; 'Traveled' seems to be (to me, at least) more evocative, and--dare I say it?--more poetic than 'Taken'; it's already in the poem. . . . hmmm, maybe that's the reason: Frost didn't want to reveal his "breathless lightning bolt of a conclusion" so early in the game. Still, why have a title that lies about what lies ahead? Just more Frostian deviousness?]
He does everything on purpose with some kind of sly intent. I am convinced of it!
Your commentary on the ending (and middle and beginning) of Frost's "The Road Not Taken" reminds me of another Frost poem with a famous ending: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." I'm guessing that if "The Road Not Taken" is Frost's most well-known poem, then surely "Stopping by Woods" must be the second most-recognized of his oeuvre. And even non-specialist readers are struck by its ending in which the penultimate line is repeated and therefore (also) becomes the final line: "And miles to go before I sleep."
My high school debate coach, Jan Reed, was an English teacher by day and I still vividly recall her take on this poem's conclusion. To provide some context, I probably should explain that Mrs. Reed was decidedly "blue-collar" in her approach to literature. That is, she had no patience for hoity-toity elitist academic critics and their theories and their desperate searches for the "deeper meanings" behind a poem's supposed symbols and the like; no, she was a champion of "common sense" and straight-forward readings. One day Mrs. Reed and I were talking about something (I forget what exactly) and she began a mini-rant about the ending of "Stopping by Woods." With obvious disdain bordering on contempt, Mrs. Reed told me something like, "When I was in school and being taught this poem, there were all these critics and professors going on and on about the 'significance' of that repeated line at the end, all this blather about mortality and death and blah blah blah, when it's clear to me that Robert Frost simply just ran out of rhymes." As I was just 18 years old at the time and my only real investment in poetry consisted of writing sad rip-offs of Richard Brautigan's rip-offs of Japanese haiku, I had no way of gauging how accurate Mrs. Reed's assessment of this poem's ending actually was. It's possible I hadn't even encountered Frost's poem yet. Regardless, I recall adopting Mrs. Reed's explanation for the poem's ending as my own and imagined that by doing so I was striking a blow for "sensible" readings, while scoffing at the tortured interpretations of the egghead professoriate.
Years later, after spending a lot of time being trained to become a member of that egghead professoriate and having spent an equal amount of time trying to learn how to write poetry, I realized that Mrs. Reed's understanding of Frost's poem and its ending was flawed. Let me explain how. But first, here's Frost's poem, all 16 compact lines of it:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Frost employs a 4-line version of Dante's terza rima, in which the terminal word of a central line of one stanza is rhymed by end-words in the next stanza. The rhyme scheme for this poem can be mapped like this: a-a-b-a / b-b-c-b / c-c-d-c / d-d-d-d. The "problem" with such interlocking rhyme schemes is how to bring them to a close since every stanza contains an element that is supposed to be echoed in the next stanza. But what if there is no next stanza, no place for a rhyme word introduced in one stanza to be mirrored in the following one? Dante's solution was to close off a string of terza rima stanzas with a rhymed couplet. Frost does something similar by concluding with a rime royal couplet in which an entire line rhymes with itself. But Frost didn't choose to conclude his poem this way because he ran out rhyme: even a cursory examination of the poem should prove that.
Mrs. Reed assumed that Frost couldn't come up with another satisfactory -eep rhyme and therefore decided to repeat "sleep." A casual inquiry to the omniscient Google reveals that there are at least 177 -eep rhymes to choose from, so I'm skeptical Frost lacked the resources to include another -eep word. And besides, and most importantly, Frost didn't 'need' another -eep rhyme in the first place. That third line of the fourth stanza, were he to continue following the formal strategy he'd established, should have been some other rhyme-sound entirely, an 'e'-rhyme nesting in between the three -eep 'd'-rhymes. And that was Frost's real issue: how should he end that fourth stanza's third line? If he followed the pattern he'd set up in the first three stanzas, the end-word of that third line would either be an orphan (with no brothers or sisters to be found, since a fifth stanza would not be written) or it would have to rhyme with a word that appeared in a previous stanza, probably the first, making the poem circle back to its beginnings. Had Frost chosen that route, he wouldn't be seeking an -eep rhyme but rather an 'o' rhyme. And, c'mon, we can't pretend that Frost had run out of 'o' rhymes. Indulge me now as I engage in a profound act of hubris by proposing an alternative penultimate line that would fulfill the requirements of this 'circular' strategy:
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep
(Crops to harvest and seeds to sow),
And miles to go before I sleep.
Yeah, yeah, there are several reasons this proposed line sucks bilge water, not the least being that harvesting and planting are not winter activities; plus, the parenthetical rendering does not seem particularly Frost-like. But in my line's defense, this stanza is very future-oriented--the promises, the miles yet to be traveled--and so talking about future agriculture (with all the possible symbolic meanings that could be wrung from such activity) seemed . . . well, defensible. Mostly what my proposed revision demonstrates is how absolutely right Frost was when he chose to conclude his poem by ignoring a formal requirement he'd put in place and then--audaciously, in my opinion--simply repeating a line that already had finality inscribed in its DNA, making final even more final. And with all due respect to Mrs. Reed, the critics and professors she disparaged were right: repeating the line does change its meaning and, by extension, the meaning of the entire poem. A statement of physical fact ("miles to go") is infused with a metaphysicality not present before the repetition: the statement has been transformed into metaphor, and that transformation transports the poem into an entirely new realm of interpretive possibilities.
At least, that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
I love this so much. And I never read the terza rima in this--I am a fool.