The World's Most Misread Poem

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I love Robert Frost. Not because he’s warm, cuddly, and treasures natural environments, but largely for the opposite—he possesses a bit of a mean streak and enjoyed, on occasion, really “getting one over” on his readers. Sly dog. He knew our flaws, the times we most needed a boost, and most of all, he knew that when it comes to story structure, Americans prize endings above all. “The ending” is the god of our story arcs. How many times have you heard, “I was really enjoying the movie, but the ending just made no sense.” Or how about our recent obsession with finales?

Thus, “The Road Not Taken.” You all know what I’m talking about. You’ve heard the final two lines endlessly quoted for inspiration, framed or displayed on walls as a “successory,” and if you walked the streets asking any passerby to name one American poet and poem, this would surely be in the top, if not the peak itself.

As a teacher, I have taught this poem countless times, with my pedagogy, over time, approaching that of boot-camp drills. Robert Frost knew readers didn’t care about middles, about the journey (that extra-special Frost dagger of irony, given the poem’s subject), and yet there the truth sits, exactly in the middle of the poem, written as plain as a road sign:

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.

Eight lines precede the four lines above. Eight lines follow. And these four lines may as well have been 20 centuries ago by the time readers arrive at the breathless lightning bolt of a conclusion, “I took the one less traveled by, / and that has made all the difference.” Even the three lines before these final two, as if Frost were giving us one last shot at redemption, read, “I shall be telling this with a sigh / somewhere ages and ages hence: / Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—.” The man may has well have been waving a massive flag, with the speaker using the pronoun “I” twice in succession, as if lifting himself to a heavenly podium.

Frost, near the mid-point of his life, not the older images we are accustomed to.

I confess to admiring the deviousness here, the boldness of the game—like that of a trickster figure—to get his readers to perform in a mere 20 lines the very action he criticizes: looking back over one’s life and lending great importance and embellishment to that which, in the moment (or middle), was rather unremarkable. And not only that (this wouldn’t be enough for Mr. Frost), but to get readers to perform it again and again to the point where two versions of the same poem may as well be on Mount Olympus—the misread poem of inspiration, and the poem with the forgotten journey at its middle, where the paths “equally lay” and there is no road less traveled by.

Four Midjourney renditions of the full text of “The Road Not Taken”

Oh man, Robert Frost, you are tricky—I imagine him taking great pleasure in this. And if you think this is the only example of Frost the Trickster, think again. Let’s take another famous poem (the man did win the Pulitzer Prize four times after all), “Mending Wall.”

Oh Mr. Frost, I see what you are up to! The speaker says, “Before I built a wall I’d ask to know / What I was walling in or out, / and to whom I was like to give offense.” (What a pun on “to give offense”! Frost is slippery!). But here’s the thing, the speaker is literally building a wall during the poem, with his neighbor, the person he says he would ask these questions. Yet, he does not ask, even in performing the very action during which he says he would. He just builds. He accepts the wall. He will rebuild it again next year and not ask these questions he says that are important. He wants the neighbor to figure this out for himself; the speaker stays mute in the comfort of his superiority, and thus, no conversation or progress is made. Robert Frost. Cuddly exterior but so, so devious.

Anyway, back to “The Road Not Taken” (again, devious! As the speaker not only takes the road, but says it was “less” traveled, not “untraveled”! Sigh.) this is what I would say to my students, “There is no road less traveled by.” Even when pointing out the lines block quoted above, this fact is not easily accepted—but the ending says there is one! To which I respond, Why do you not care about middles or beginnings? Why does the end matter the most? We argue. Sometimes tension builds. We play tug-of-war over a treasured cultural object, and in some cases, the only poem many introductory students have ever known.

And then I admit the truth. I never came to this conclusion on my own: a teacher once pointed out this same thing to me. It’s like the allegory of the cave merged with Trickster Frost—the philosopher king drags readers back up into the light, which happens to shine on the poem’s middle, not end. So now I am repeating this bit of history, much in the same way Frost describes the people who inhabit his poems—repeating things, like the seasons, like swinging on birches.

But the other day I changed course a bit, for the first time in longer than I’d like to admit (I think about poems and literature a lot; I’m pretty sure I saw Walt Whitman at the supermarket the other day): just because the two roads are “worn” the same or look the same, this does not mean that one was not less traveled by. It’s not as if there are turnstiles at the road’s fork, keeping count. It’s not as if the speaker is a mystic who can stir the ground leaves and obtain exact numbers. It’s not a toll road. The speaker may indeed have taken the road less traveled; they just wouldn’t know it for sure. Either way, others have traveled it, or else it wouldn’t be a path or a road, right? Maybe the thing to do here was take a hard right into the woods where there was no path, no “way” that would eventually lead to another way. Does it matter if you take the road less traveled and don’t know it? I press this in the context of my previous posts which ask, “Can one person make a difference?”

If there’s something to love just as much as endings (at least when it comes to stories), we in America love the trailblazer, the individual. But I’m sure Frost would laugh at this myth as well, considering our history where those trailblazers are a minority of some fashion. And again, in these instances, “The Road Not Taken” will play out in exactly the way Frost described (crafty bugger): when someone fights in the moment, or in terms of the poem, in the middle of the journey, many will feel one way. But much later down the road a new ending will read, “That person/those people took the road less traveled by, and I supported them on the whole journey!”

But there sure are a lot of faces in the images of history, lining and blocking the roads less traveled. But none of them are us right? Frost saw that as being as natural as apple trees.