^ Robert Frost, " A Group of Poems", The Atlantic Monthly (August 1915).He was hard on himself that way." References In Frost's words, Thomas was "a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. Thompson suggests that the poem's narrator is "one who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice made: belatedly but wistfully he sighs over the attractive alternative rejected." Thompson also says that when introducing the poem in readings, Frost would say that the speaker was based on his friend Edward Thomas. According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost's biographer, as Frost was once about to read the poem, he commented to his audience, "You have to be careful of that one it's a tricky poem-very tricky," perhaps intending to suggest the poem's ironic possibilities. However, there is significance in the difference between what the speaker has just said of the two roads, and what he will say in the future. A New York Times book review on Brian Hall's 2008 biography Fall of Frost states: "Whichever way they go, they're sure to miss something good on the other path." Regarding the "sigh" that is mentioned in the last stanza, it may be seen as an expression of regret or of satisfaction. The two roads are interchangeable.''įrost himself wrote the poem as a joke for his friend Edward Thomas, who was often indecisive about which route to take when the two went walking. " The poem’s speaker tells us he 'shall be telling,' at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled…yet he has already admitted that the two paths 'equally lay / In leaves' and 'the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.' So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. A critique in The Paris Review by David Orr described the misunderstanding this way: Actually, it expresses some irony regarding such an idea. Yet, it is a frequently misunderstood poem, often read simply as a poem that champions the idea of "following your own path". "The Road Not Taken" is one of Frost's most popular works. In one of the few lines containing strictly iambs, the more regular rhythm supports the idea of a turning towards an acceptance of a kind of reality: "Though as for that the passing there … " In the final line, the way the rhyme and rhythm work together is significantly different, and catches the reader off guard. The variation of its rhythm gives naturalness, a feeling of thought occurring spontaneously, affecting the reader's sense of expectation. "The Road Not Taken" reads naturally or conversationally, beginning as a kind of photographic depiction of a quiet moment in yellow woods. The meter is basically iambic tetrameter, with each line having four two-syllable feet, though in almost every line, in different positions, an iamb is replaced with an anapest. With the rhyme scheme as 'ABAAB', the first line rhymes with the third and fourth, and the second line rhymes with the fifth. The poem consists of four stanzas of five lines each.
Thomas was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.
Thomas took the poem seriously and personally, and it may have been significant in Thomas' decision to enlist in World War I. After Frost returned to New Hampshire in 1915, he sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken". Thomas was indecisive about which road to take, and in retrospect often lamented that they should have taken the other one. One day, as they were walking together, they came across two roads. Thomas and Frost became close friends and took many walks together. Frost spent the years 1912 to 1915 in England, where among his acquaintances was the writer Edward Thomas.
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