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1. creator: Sally Potter
2. brief: Sally Potter's film follows a day in the life of Leo (Javier Bardem) and his daughter, Molly (Elle Fanning), as he floats through alternate lives he could have lived, leading Molly to wrestle with her own path as she considers her future
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4. country: UK

 

Andrew has a keen interest in all aspects of poetry and writes extensively on the subject. His poems are published online and in print. Robert Frost, Source Robert Frost And A Summary of The Road Not Taken "The Road Not Taken" is an ambiguous poem that allows the reader to think about choices in life, whether to go with the mainstream or go it alone. If life is a journey, this poem highlights those times in life when a decision has to be made. Which way will you go? The ambiguity springs from the question of free will versus determinism, whether the speaker in the poem consciously decides to take the road that is off the beaten track or only does so because he doesn't fancy the road with the bend in it. External factors therefore make up his mind for him. Robert Frost wrote this poem to highlight a trait of, and poke fun at, his friend Edward Thomas, an English-Welsh poet, who, when out walking with Frost in England would often regret not having taken a different path. Thomas would sigh over what they might have seen and done, and Frost thought this quaintly romantic. In other words, Frost's friend regretted not taking the road that might have offered the best opportunities, despite it being an unknown. Frost liked to tease and goad. He told Thomas: No matter which road you take, you'll always sigh and wish you'd taken another. So it's ironic that Frost meant the poem to be somewhat light-hearted, but it turned out to be anything but. People take it very seriously. It is the hallmark of the true poet to take such everyday realities, in this case, the sighs of a friend on a country walk, and transform them into something so much more. "The Road Not Taken" is all about what did not happen: This person, faced with an important conscious decision, chose the least popular, the path of most resistance. He was destined to go down one, regretted not being able to take both, so he sacrificed one for the other. Ultimately, the reader is left to make up their own mind about the emotional state of the speaker at the end. Was the choice of the road less travelled a positive one? It certainly made "all the difference. but Frost does not make it clear just what this difference is. All of Robert Frost's poems can be found in this exceptional book, The Collected Poems, which I use for all my analyses. It contains all of his classics and more. It's the most comprehensive collection currently on offer. "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost 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. What Is the Main Theme of "The Road Not Taken? The main theme of the "The Road Not Taken" is that it is often impossible to see where a life-altering decision will lead. Thus, one should make their decision swiftly and with confidence. It is normal to wonder what the outcome would have been if the other road, the road not taken, was the road chosen. But to contemplate this hypothetical deeply is folly, for it is impossible to say whether taking the other road would have been better or worse: all one can say is that it would have been different. What Is the Central Message of "The Road Not Taken? "The Road Not Taken" suddenly presents the speaker and the reader with a dilemma. There are two roads in an autumnal wood separating off, presumably the result of the one road splitting, and there's nothing else to do but to choose one of the roads and continue life's journey. The central message is that, in life, we are often presented with choices. When making a choice, one is required to make a decision. Viewing a choice as a fork in a path, it becomes clear that we must choose one direction or another, but not both. In "The Road Not Taken. Frost does not indicate whether the road he chose was the right one. Nonetheless, that is the way he is going now, and the place he ends up, for better or worse, was the result of his decision. This poem is not about taking the road less travelled, about individuality or uniqueness. This poem is about the road taken, to be sure, as well the road not taken, not necessarily the road less traveled. Any person who has made a decisive choice will agree that it is human nature to contemplate the "What if. had you made the choice you did not make. This pondering about the different life one may have lived had they done something differently is central to "The Road Not Taken. " The speaker opts, at random, for the other road and, once on it, declares himself happy because it has more grass and not many folk have been down it. Anyway, he could always return one day and try the 'original' road again. Would that be possible? Perhaps not, life has a way of letting one thing leading to another until going backwards is just no longer an option. But who knows what the future holds down the road? The speaker implies that, when he's older he might look back at this turning point in his life, the morning he took the road less travelled, because taking that particular route completely altered his way of being. What Is the Structure of "The Road Not Taken? This poem consists of four stanzas, each five lines in length (a quintrain) with a mix of iambic and anapaestic tetrameter, producing a steady rhythmical four beat first-person narrative. Most common speech is a combination of iambs and anapaests, so Frost chose his lines to reflect this: Two roads di verged in a yell ow wood, And sor ry I could not tra vel both This simple looking poem, mostly monosyllabic, has a traditional rhyme scheme of ABAAB which helps keep the lines tight, whilst the use of enjambment (where one line runs into the next with no punctuation) keeps the sense flowing. The whole poem is an extended metaphor; the road is life, and it diverges, that is, splits apart–forks. There is a decision to be made and a life will be changed. Perhaps forever. What Is the Mood and Tone of "The Road Not Taken? Whilst this is a reflective, thoughtful poem, it's as if the speaker is caught in two minds. He's encountered a turning point. The situation is clear enough - take one path or the other, black or white - go ahead, do it. But life is rarely that simple. We're human, and our thinking processes are always on the go trying to work things out. You take the high road, I'll take the low road. Which is best? So, the tone is meditative. As this person stands looking at the two options, he is weighing the pros and cons in a quiet, studied manner. The situation demands a serious approach, for who knows what the outcome will be? All the speaker knows is that he prefers the road less travelled, perhaps because he enjoys solitude and believes that to be important. Whatever the reason, once committed, he'll more than likely never look back. On reflection, however, taking the road "because it was grassy and wanted wear" has made all the difference, all the difference in the world. What Are the Poetic Devices Used in "The Road Not Taken? In "The Road Not Taken. Frost primarily makes use of metaphor. Other poetic devices include the rhythm in which he wrote the poem, but these aspects are covered in the section on structure. What Is the Figurative Meaning of "The Road Not Taken? Frost uses the road as a metaphor for life: he portrays our lives as a path we are walking along toward an undetermined destination. Then, the poet reaches a fork in the road. The fork is a metaphor for a life-altering choice in which a compromise is not possible. The traveler must go one way, or the other. The descriptions of each road (one bends under the undergrowth, and the other is "just as fair" indicates to the reader that, when making a life-altering decision, it is impossible to see where that decision will lead. At the moment of decision-making, both roads present themselves equally, thus the choice of which to go down is, essentially, a toss up–a game of chance. The metaphor is activated. Life offers two choices, both are valid but the outcomes could be vastly different, existentially speaking. Which road to take? The speaker is in two minds. He wants to travel both, and is "sorry" he cannot, but this is physically impossible. What Is the Literal Meaning of "The Road Not Taken? Literally, The Road Not Taken" tells the story of a man who reaches a fork in the road, and randomly chooses to take one and not the other. What Is the Symbolism of "The Road Not Taken? The road, itself, symbolizes the journey of life, and the image of a road forking off into two paths symbolizes a choice. As for color, Frost describes the forest as a "yellow wood. Yellow can be considered a middle color, something in-between and unsure of itself. This sets the mood of indecision that characterizes the language of the poem. Frost also mentions the color black in the lines: And both the morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Clearly, this is to emphasize that both roads appeared untouched, not having been tarnished by the foot of a previous traveler. The poet is the first to encounter this dilemma. What Is the Point of View of "The Road Not Taken? The point of view is of the traveler, who, walking along a single path, encounters a fork in the road and stops to contemplate which path he should follow. How Do the Two Roads Differ in "The Road Not Taken? The two roads in "The Road Not Taken" hardly differ. The first road is described as bending into the undergrowth. The second road is described as "just as fair. though it was "grassy and wanted wear. " At this, it seems the second road is overgrown and less travelled, but then the poet writes: Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no steps had trodden black. So, again, the roads are equalized. Yet, as if to confuse the reader, Frost writes in the final stanza: I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. With that, we are left to wonder how Frost knew the road he took was the one less traveled by. But Frost likely left this ambiguity on purpose so that the reader would not focus so much on condition of the road, and, instead, focus on the fact that he chose a road (any road, whether it was that which was less traveled by or not) and that, as a result, he has seen a change in his life. "The Road Not Taken" in Orange Is the New Black (Video) Sources Norton Anthology of Poetry, 2005, Norton. The Hand of the Poet, 1997, Rizzoli. 100 Essential Modern Poems, 2005, Ivan Dee. Questions & Answers Question: Can you explain iambic anapaestic tetrameter? Answer: Please read the analysis in my article. 2017 Andrew Spacey.

Movie Watch The Roads Not taken 2. Everyone knows Robert Frosts “The Road Not Taken”—and almost everyone gets it wrong. Frost in 1913. From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, a new book by David Orr. A young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past: the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As a car slows to pick him up, we realize the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now hes accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life hes chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold—for its a commercial weve been watching—the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears. The advertisement Ive just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice: 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. It is, of course, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognize the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognize any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognize a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely. But this isnt just any poem. Its “The Road Not Taken, ” and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture —and in world culture as well. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that its almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem. In addition to the Ford commercial, “The Road Not Taken” has been used in advertisements for Mentos, Nicorette, the multibillion-dollar insurance company AIG, and the job-search Web site, which deployed the poem during Super Bowl XXXIV to great success. Its lines have been borrowed by musical performers including (among many others) Bruce Hornsby, Melissa Etheridge, George Strait, and Talib Kweli, and its provided episode titles for more than a dozen television series, including Taxi, The T w i l i g h t Zone, and B a t t le s t a r Galactica, as well as lending its name to at least one video game, Spry Foxs Road Not Taken (“a rogue-like puzzle game about surviving lifes surprises”. As one might expect, the influence of “The Road Not Taken” is even greater on journalists and authors. Over the past thirty-five years alone, language from Frosts poem has appeared in nearly two thousand news stories worldwide, which yields a rate of more than once a week. In addition, “The Road Not Taken” appears as a title, subtitle, or chapter heading in more than four hundred books by authors other than Robert Frost, on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending zombie apocalypse. At least one of these was a massive international best seller: M. Scott Pecks self-help book The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, which was originally published in 1978 and has sold more than seven million copies in the United States and Canada. Given the pervasiveness of Frosts lines, it should come as no surprise that the popularity of “The Road Not Taken” appears to exceed that of every other major twentieth-century American poem, including those often considered more central to the modern (and modernist) era. Admittedly, the popularity of poetry is difficult to judge. Poems that are attractive to educators may not be popular with readers, so the appearance of a given poem in anthologies and on syllabi doesnt necessarily reveal much. And book sales indicate more about the popularity of a particular poet than of any individual poem. But there are at least two reasons to think that “The Road Not Taken” is the most widely read and recalled American poem of the past century (and perhaps the adjective “American” could be discarded. The first is the Favorite Poem Project, which was devised by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky. Pinsky used his public role to ask Americans to submit their favorite poem in various forms; the clear favorite among more than eighteen thousand entries was “The Road Not Taken. ” The second, more persuasive reason comes from Google. Until it was discontinued in late 2012, a tool called Google Insights for Search allowed anyone to see how frequently certain expressions were being searched by users worldwide over time and to compare expressions to one another. Google normalized the data to account for regional differences in population, converted it to a scale of one to one hundred, and displayed the results so that the relative differences in search volume would be obvious. Here is the result that Google provided when “The Road Not Taken” and “Frost” were compared with several of the best-known modern poems and their authors, all of which are often taught alongside Frosts work in college courses on American poetry of the first half of the twentieth century: SEARCH TERMS, SCALED WORLDWIDE SEARCH VOLUME “Road Not Taken” + “Frost” 48 “Waste Land” + “Eliot” 12 “Prufrock ” + “Eliot” “This Is Just to Say” + “Carlos Williams” 4 “Station of the Metro” + “Pound” 2 According to Google, then, “The Road Not Taken” was, as of mid-2012, at least four times as searched as the central text of the modernist era— The Waste Land —and at least twenty-four times as searched as the most anthologized poem by Ezra Pound. By comparison, this is even greater than the margin by which the term “college football ” beats “archery” and “water polo. ” Given Frosts typically prickly relationships with almost all of his peers (he once described Ezra Pound as trying to become original by “imitating somebody that hasnt been imitated recently”) one can only imagine the pleasure this news would have brought him. But as everyone knows, poetry itself isnt especially widely read, so perhaps being the most popular poem is like being the most widely requested salad at a steak house. How did “The Road Not Taken” fare against slightly tougher competition? Better than you might think: 47 “Like a Rolling Stone” + “Dylan” 19 “Great Gatsby ” + “Fitzgerald” 17 “Death of a Salesman” + “Miller” 14 “Psycho” + “Hitchcock” The results here are even more impressive when you consider that “The Road Not Taken” is routinely misidentified as “The Road Less Traveled, ” thereby reducing the search volume under the poems actual title. (For instance, a search for “Frosts poem the road less traveled” produces more than two hundred thousand results, none of which would have been counted above. Frost once claimed his goal as a poet was “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of ”; with “The Road Not Taken, ” he appears to have lodged his lines in granite. On a word-for-word basis, it may be the most popular piece of literature ever written by an American. * And almost everyone gets it wrong. This is the most remarkable thing about “The Road Not Taken”—not its immense popularity (which is remarkable enough) but the fact that it is popular for what seem to be the wrong reasons. Its worth pausing here to underscore a truth so obvious that it is often taken for granted: Most widely celebrated artistic projects are known for being essentially what they purport to be. When we play “White Christmas” in December, we correctly assume that its a song about memory and longing centered around the image of snow falling at Christmas. When we read Joyces Ulysses, we correctly assume that its a complex story about a journey around Dublin as filtered through many voices and styles. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served. Frosts poem turns this expectation on its head. Most readers consider “The Road Not Taken” to be a paean to triumphant self-assertion (“I took the one less traveled by”) but the literal meaning of the poems own lines seems completely at odds with this interpretation. The poems speaker tells us he “shall be telling, ” at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled by, 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. The two roads are interchangeable. According to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance. The poem isnt a salute to can-do individualism; its a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheeps clothing. ” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheeps clothing. In this it strongly resembles its creator. Frost is the only major literary figure in American history with two distinct audiences, one of which regularly assumes that the other has been deceived. The first audience is relatively small and consists of poetry devotees, most of whom inhabit the art forms academic subculture. For these readers, Frost is a mainstay of syllabi and seminars, and a regular subject of scholarly articles (though he falls well short of inspiring the interest that Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens enjoy. Hes considered bleak, dark, complex, and manipulative; a genuine poets poet, not a historical artifact like Longfellow or a folk balladeer like Carl Sandburg. While Frost isnt the most esteemed of the early twentieth-century poets, very few dedicated poetry readers talk about him as if he wrote greeting card verse. Then there is the other audience. This is the great mass of readers at all age levels who can conjure a few lines of “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, ” and possibly “Mending Wall ” or “Birches, ” and who think of Frost as quintessentially American in the way that “amber waves of grain” are quintessentially American. To these readers (or so the first audience often assumes) he isnt bleak or sardonic but rather a symbol of Yankee stoicism and countrified wisdom. This audience is large. Indeed, the search patterns of Google users indicate that, in terms of popularity, Frosts true peers arent Pound or Stevens or Eliot, but rather figures like Pablo Picasso and Winston Churchill. Frost is not simply that rare bird, a popular poet; he is one of the best-known personages of the past hundred years in any cultural arena. In all of American history, the only writers who can match or surpass him are Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, and the only poet in the history of English-language verse who commands more attention is William Shakespeare. This level of recognition makes poetry readers uncomfortable. Poets, we assume, are not popular—at least after 1910 or so. If one becomes popular, then either he must be a second-tier talent catering to mass taste (as Sandburg is often thought to be) or there must be some kind of confusion or deception going on. The latter explanation is generally applied to Frosts celebrity. As Robert Lowell once put it, “Robert Frost at midnight, the audience gone / to vapor, the great act laid on the shelf in mothballs. ” The “great act” is for “the audience” of ordinary readers, but his true admirers know better. He is really a wolf, we say, and it is only the sheep who are fooled. Its an explanation that Frost himself sometimes encouraged, much as he used to boast about the trickiness of “The Road Not Taken” in private correspondence. (“Ill bet not half a dozen people can tell who was hit and where he was hit by my Road Not Taken, ” he wrote to his friend Louis Untermeyer. In this sense, the poem is emblematic. Just as millions of people know its language about the road “less traveled” without understanding what that language is actually saying, millions of people recognize its author without understanding what that author was actually doing. But is this view of “The Road Not Taken” and its creator entirely accurate? Poems, after all, arent arguments—they are to be interpreted, not proven, and that process of interpretation admits a range of possibilities, some supported by diction, some by tone, some by quirks of form and structure. Certainly its wrong to say that “The Road Not Taken” is a straightforward and sentimental celebration of individualism: this interpretation is contradicted by the poems own lines. Yet its also not quite right to say that the poem is merely a knowing literary joke disguised as shopworn magazine verse that has somehow managed to fool millions of readers for a hundred years. A role too artfully assumed ceases to become a role and instead becomes a species of identity—an observation equally true of Robert Frost himself. One of Frosts greatest advocates, the scholar Richard Poirier, has written with regard to Frosts recognition among ordinary readers that “there is no point trying to explain the popularity away, as if it were a misconception prompted by a pose. ” By the same token, there is no point in trying to explain away the general misreadings of “The Road Not Taken, ” as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem both is and isnt about individualism, and it both is and isnt about rationalization. It isnt a wolf in sheeps clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads. From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong by David Orr. Reprinted by arrangement with The Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright 2015 by David Orr. David Orr is the poetry columnist for the  New York Times Book Review. He is the winner of the Nona Balakian Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has appeared in  The New Yorker,  Poetry, Slate, and  The Yale Review.

Movie watch the roads not taken 2. Movie Watch The Roads Not taken 3. Movie Watch The Roads not taken. Movie watch the roads not taken video. My poems—I should suppose everybodys poems—are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving my blocks carts chairs and such like ordinaries where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark. FROST TO LEONIDAS W. PAYNE JR., November 1, 1927. “The Road Not Taken” has confused audiences literally from the beginning. In the spring of 1915, Frost sent an envelope to Edward Thomas that contained only one item: a draft of “The Road Not Taken, ” under the title “Two Roads. ” According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost had been inspired to write the poem by Thomass habit of regretting whatever path the pair took during their long walks in the countryside—an impulse that Frost equated with the romantic predisposi­tion for “crying over what might have been. ” Frost, Thompson writes, believed that his friend “would take the poem as a gen­tle joke and would protest, ‘Stop teasing me. ”   Article continues after advertisement That wasnt what occurred. Instead, Thomas sent Frost an admiring note in which it was evident that he had as­sumed the poems speaker was a version of Frost, and that the final line was meant to be read as generations of high school valedictorians have assumed. The sequence of their correspondence on the poem is a miniature version of the confusion “The Road Not Taken” would provoke in millions of subsequent readers: 1.  Frost sends the poem to Thomas, with no clarify­ing text, in March or April of 1915. 2.  Thomas responds shortly thereafter in a letter now evidently lost but referred to in later corre­spondence, calling the poem “staggering” but missing Frosts intention. 3.  Frost responds in a letter (the date is unclear) to ask Thomas for further comment on the poem, hoping to hear that Thomas understood that it was at least in part addressing his own behavior. 4.  Thomas responds in a letter dated June 13, 1915, explaining that “the simple words and unemphatic rhythms were not such as I was accustomed to expect great things, things I like, from. It stag­gered me to think that perhaps I had always missed what made poetry poetry. ” Its still clear that Thomas doesnt quite understand the poems stance or Frosts “joke” at his expense. Article continues after advertisement 5.  Frost writes back on June 26, 1915: “Methinks thou strikest too hard in so small a matter. A tap would have settled my poem. I wonder if it was because you were trying too much out of regard for me that you failed to see that the sigh [in line 16] was a mock sigh, hypo­critical for the fun of the I dont suppose I was ever sorry for any­ thing I ever did except by assumption to see how it would feel. ” 6.  Thomas responds on July 11, 1915: “You have got me again over the Path not taken & no mistake. 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. ” Edward Thomas was one of the keenest literary thinkers of his time, and the poem was meant to capture aspects of his own personality and past. Yet even Thomas needed explicit instructions—indeed, six entire letters—in order to appreciate the series of double games played in “The Road Not Taken. ” That misperception galled Frost. As Thompson writes, Frost “could never bear to tell the truth about the failure of this lyric to perform as he intended it. Instead, he frequently told an idealized version of the story” in which, for instance, Thomas said, “What are you trying to do with me? ” or “What are you doing with my character? ” One can understand Frosts unhappiness, considering that the poem was misunderstood by one of his own early biographers, Eliz­abeth Shepley Sergeant (“Thomas, all his life, lived on the deeply isolated, lonely and subjective ‘way less travelled by which Frost had chosen in youth”) and also by the eminent poet-critic Robert Graves, who came to the somewhat baffling conclusion that the poem had to do with Frosts “agonized decision” not to enlist in the British army. (There is no evidence that Frost ever contemplated doing so, in agony or otherwise. Lyrics that are especially lucid and accessible are sometimes described as “critic-­proof”; “The Road Not Taken”—at least in its first few decades—came close to being reader­-proof. The difficulty with “The Road Not Taken” starts, ap­propriately enough, with its title. Recall the poems conclu­sion: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference. ” These are not only the poems best­-known lines, but the ones that capture what most readers take to be its central image: a lonely path that we take at great risk, possibly for great reward. So vivid is that image that many readers simply assume that the poem is called “The Road Less Traveled. ” Search­ engine data indicates that searches for “Frost” and “Road Less Traveled” (or “Travelled”) are extremely common, and even ac­complished critics routinely refer to the poem by its most famous line. For example, in an otherwise penetrating essay on Frosts ability to say two things at once, Kathryn Schulz, the book reviewer for New York magazine, mistakenly calls the poem “The Road Less Traveled” and then, in an irony Frost might have savored, describes it as “not-very-Frosty. ” Because the poem isnt “The Road Less Traveled. ” Its “The Road Not Taken. ” And the road not taken, of course, is the road one didnt take—which means that the title passes over the “less traveled” road the speaker claims to have fol­lowed in order to foreground the road he never tried. The title isnt about what he did; its about what he didnt do. Or is it? The more one thinks about it, the more difficult it be­ comes to be sure who is doing what and why. As the scholar Mark Richardson puts it: Which road, after all, is the road “not taken”? Is it the one the speaker takes, which, according to his last description of it, is “less travelled”—that is to say, not taken by others? Or does the title refer to the suppos­edly better-­travelled road that the speaker himself fails to take? Precisely who is not doing the taking? We know that Frost originally titled the poem “Two Roads, ” so renaming it “The Road Not Taken” was a matter of deliberation, not whim. Frost wanted readers to ask the questions Richardson asks. More than that, he wanted to juxtapose two visions—two possible poems, you might say—at the very beginning of his lyric. The first is the poem that readers think of as “The Road Less Traveled, ” in which the speaker is quietly con­ gratulating himself for taking an uncommon path (that is, a path not taken by others. The second is the parodic poem that Frost himself claimed to have originally had in mind, in which the dominant tone is one of self­-dramatizing regret (over the path not taken by the speaker. These two potential poems revolve around each other, separating and overlapping like clouds in a way that leaves neither reading perfectly visible. If this is what Frost meant to do, then its reasonable to wonder if, as Thomas suggested, he may have outsmarted himself in addition to casual readers. But this depends on what you think “The Road Not Taken” is trying to say. If you believe the poem is meant to take a position on will, agency, the nature of choice, and so forth—as the majority of readers have assumed—then it can seem unsatisfying (at best “a kind of joke, ” as Schulz puts it.   But if you think of the poem not as stating various viewpoints but rather as performing them, setting them beside and against one another, then a very different reading emerges. Here its helpful, as is so often the case, to call upon a 19th-­century logician. In The Elements of Logic, Richard Whately describes the fallacy of substitution like so: Two distinct objects may, by being dexterously pre­sented, again and again in quick succession, to the mind of a cursory reader, be so associated together in his thoughts, as to be conceived capable. of being actually combined in practice. The fallacious belief thus induced bears a striking resemblance to the opti­cal illusion effected by that ingenious and philosophi­cal toy called the Thaumatrope; in which two objects painted on opposite sides of a card, —for instance a man, and a horse, —a bird, and a cage, —are, by a quick rotatory motion, made to impress the eye in combination, so as to form one picture, of the man on the horses back, the bird in the cage, etc. What is fallacious in an argument can be mesmerizing in a poem. “The Road Not Taken” acts as a kind of thaumatrope, rotating its two opposed visions so that they seem at times to merge. And that merging is produced not by a careful blend­ ing of the two—a union—but by “rapid and frequent transi­tion, ” as Whately puts it. The title itself is a small but potent engine that drives us first toward one untaken road and then immediately back to the other, producing a vision in which we appear somehow on both roads, or neither. That sense of movement is critical to the manner  in which the poem unfolds. We are continually being “reset” as we move through the stanzas, with the poem pivoting from one reading to the other so quickly that its easy to miss the transitions. This is true even of its first line. Heres how the poem begins: 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... The most significant word in the stanza—and perhaps the most overlooked yet essential word in the poem—is “roads. ” Frost could, after all, have said two “paths” or “trails” or “tracks” and conveyed nearly the same concept. Yet, as the scholar George Monteiro observes: Frost seems to have deliberately chosen the word “roads. ”. In fact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem, “Two paths diverged in a yellow wood, ” Frost reacted with such feeling—“Two roads! ”—that the transcription of his reply made it necessary both to italicize the word “roads” and to follow it with an exclamation point. Frost re­cited the poem all right, but, as his friend remem­bered, “he didnt let me get away with ‘two paths! ” What is gained by “roads”? Primarily two things. First, a road, unlike a path, is necessarily man­made. Dante may have found his life similarly changed “in a dark wood, ” but Frost takes things a step further by placing his speaker in a setting that combines the natural world with civilization—yes, the traveler is alone in a forest, but whichever way he goes, he follows a course built by other people, one that will be taken, in turn, by still other people long after he has passed. The act of choosing may be solitary, but the context in which it occurs is not. Second, as Wendell Berry puts it, a path differs from a road in that it “obeys the natural con­ tours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around. ” A road is an assertion of will, not an accommodation. So the speakers de­cision, when it comes, whatever it is, will be an act of will that can occur only within the bounds of another such act—a way of looking at the world that simultaneously undercuts and strengthens the idea of individual choice. This doubled effect continues in the poems second and third lines, which summarize the dilemma around which “The Road Not Taken” is constructed: “And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler. ” Frost often likes to use repetition and its cousin, redundancy, to suggest the complex contours of seemingly simple concepts. In this case, we have what seems like the most straightforward proposi­tion imaginable: If a road forks, a single person cant “travel both” branches. But the concept is oddly extended to include the observation that one cant “travel both” and “be one trav­eler, ” which seems superfluous. After all, Frost might more easily and obviously have written the stanza like so (empha­sis mine) To where they ended, long I stood What, then, is the difference between saying one cant “travel both” roads and saying one cant “travel both / And be one traveler”? And why does Frost think that difference worth preserving? One way to address these questions is to think about what the speaker is actually suggesting hes “sorry” about. He isnt, for instance, sorry that he wont see whats at the end of each road. (If he were, it would make more sense to use the modified version above. Rather, hes sorry he lacks the capability to see whats at the end of each road—hes objecting not to the outcome of the principle that you cant be two places at once, but to the principle itself. Hes resisting the idea of a universe in which his selfhood is limited, in part by being subject to choices. (Compare this to the case of a person who regrets that he cant travel through time not be­ cause he wishes he could, say, attend the premiere of Hamlet, but simply because he wants to experience time travel. ) This assumes, of course, that the speaker regrets that he cant travel both roads simultaneously. But what if he instead means that it would be impossible to “travel both / And be one traveler” even if he returned later to take the second road? As Robert Faggen puts it, the suggestion here is that “experience alters the traveler”: The act of choosing changes the person making the choice. This point will be quietly re­inforced two stanzas later, when the speaker says that “know­ ing how way leads on to way. I doubted if I should ever come back”—the doubt is not only that he might return again to the same physical spot, but that he could return to the crossroads as the same person, the same “I, ” who left it. This reading of the poem is subtly different from, and bolder than, the idea that existence is merely subject to the need to make decisions. If we cant persist unchanged through any one choice, then every choice becomes a matter of existential significance—after all, we arent merely deciding to go left or right; were transforming our very selves. At the same time, however, if each choice changes the self, then at some point the “self” in question becomes nothing more than a series of accumulated actions, many of them extremely minor. Frosts peculiar addition—“And be one traveler”—consequently both elevates and reduces the idea of the chooser while at the same time both elevating and reducing the choice. The thau­matrope spins, the roads blur and merge. This is only the first stanza of “The Road Not Taken, ” and already its lines seem papered over with potential interpretations, some more plausible than others, but none of which can be discarded. One can see why Thomas said he found the poem “staggering. ” But then Frost takes things a step fur­ther. Having sketched the speaker and his potential choice in all their entangled ambiguity, he undermines the idea that there is really a choice to be made at all: 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. The speaker wants to see the paths as different (one has “per­haps the better claim”) but admits that the distinctions, if they even exist, are minute (“the passing there / Had worn them really about the same”. The sameness of the roads will later be revised in the story the speaker says hell be telling “ages and ages hence”—as he famously observes, hell claim to have taken “the one less traveled by. ” Two things are worth pausing over in these stanzas. First, why is the physical appearance of the roads mentioned in the first place? We typically worry more about where roads go than what they look like. (Here again its worth contrasting “road” with “path” or “trail, ” neither of which implies a des­tination as strongly as “road. ”) So if all Frost intended was to parody a kind of romantic longing for missed opportunities, wouldnt it be more effective to imply that the roads reached the same location? As in: And making perhaps the better case, Because it seemed to lead elsewhere, Though at days end each traveler there Would finish in the selfsame place. Second, if youre determined to make the appearance of the roads the central issue, why make that appearance solely a function of how much travel each road had received? Why not  talk about how one road was sunnier or wider or stonier or steeper? “I took the one less traveled by” is often assumed to mean “I took the more difficult road, ” but this isnt neces­sarily true in either a literal or metaphorical sense. In scenic areas, after all, the less traveled paths are usually the least interesting and challenging (think of an emergency-­vehicle access road in a state park) and if we imagine “roads” as re­ferring to “life choices, ” the array of decisions that are “less traveled” yet both easy and potentially harmful is nearly end­ less (drug abuse, tax evasion, and so on. So if the idea was to suggest that the speaker wants to perceive his chosen road as not just lonely, but demanding, why not make a more direct statement that would lead to a more direct conclusion, like: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one that dared me to try. These lines are bad, admittedly, but not much worse at first glance than the poems actual concluding lines, which in­volve the addition of an apparently superfluous preposition—“by”—that is almost always omitted when the poems crowning statement is invoked. (Theres a reason M. Scott Pecks bestseller is called The Road Less Traveled rather than The Road Less Traveled By. ) So whats going on here? Again, its helpful to imagine “The Road Not Taken” as consisting of alternate glimpses of two unwritten poems, one the common misconception, the other the parody Frost sometimes claimed to have intended. Every time the poem threatens to clarify as one or the other, it resists, moving instead into an uncertain in-­between space in which both are faintly apparent, like overlapping ghosts. This is relatively easy to see with respect to the “naive” read­ing of “The Road Not Taken” as a hymn to stoic individual­ism. Had Frost wanted to write that poem, it would indeed have been titled “The Road Less Traveled, ” and it might have gone something like this: To  where they ended, long I stood To where it bent in the undergrowth; And posing perhaps the greater test, Because it was narrow and wanted wear, Rising so steeply into thinning air That a man would struggle just to rest, While the other offered room to play Or stand at ease along the track. I took the lonelier road that day, And 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: I took the one that dared me to try, And that has made all the difference. I make no claims for the elegance of this version, but it does have all the elements generally attributed to the actual “Road Not Taken”: an emphasis on solitary challenge, a tone of weary yet quietly confident resignation (what a skeptic would call self­ congratulation) and a plain choice between obviously different options. It would have been easy for Frost to write this poem. Yet thats not what he did. But neither did he write the parody that “The Road Not Taken” is widely considered to be among more sophisticated readers (or at least more care­ful readers. Frost had a barbed, nimble wit, and he would have had no trouble skewering romantic dithering more pointedly if that was all he had in mind. Such a poem might have been called “Two Roads” and gone like so: Would finish in the selfsame place, For both, I learned, were arms that lay Around the wood and met in one track. And whichever one I took that day Would  lead itself to the other way And send me forward to take me back. Still, I shall be claiming with a sigh I took the one on the left-hand side, And that has made all the difference. One of the essential elements of a parody is that it is recog­nized as such: A parody that is too obscure has failed its basic purpose. In “The Road Not Taken, ” Frost passes up several opportunities to make his “joke” more explicit, most notably by failing to give the roads a shared destination rather than simply a similar condition of wear. (And even that similarity is qualified, because it depends on the speakers perception, not his actual knowledge—after all, having failed to take the first road, he cant be sure how traveled it is or isnt, beyond his immediate line of sight. The usual interpretation of “The Road Not Taken” is almost certainly wrong, but the idea that the poem is a parody doesnt seem exactly right, either. And this brings us to the final stanza—more particularly, it brings us to one of the most carefully placed words in this delicately balanced arrangement. That word is “sigh”: Somewhere ages and ages hence... Frost mentions the sigh several times in his remarks about “The Road Not Taken, ” and while those comments are often oblique, its evident that he considered the word “sigh” es­sential to understanding the poem. It is “a mock sigh, hypocritical for the fun of the thing, ” he told Edward Thomas in 1915. It is “absolutely saving, ” he told an audience at  the Bread Loaf Conference half a century later. According to Lawrance Thompson, he would sometimes claim during public readings that a young girl had asked him about the sigh, and that he considered this a very good question—an anecdote that (in Thompsons view) was meant to encourage the audience to appreciate the poems intricacy. But why would it? After all, a sigh fits both of the usual readings of the poem, and therefore doesnt seem likely to make either of them more interesting. If we give the poem its popular, naive interpretation, then the sigh is one of tired yet self-­assured acceptance bordering on satisfaction: The speaker has taken the hard road, faced obstacles, lost things along the way, regrets, hes had a few—and yet hes ended up in a better, stronger place. Its a sigh of hard­-won maturity or tedious faux humility, depending on how you look at it. By contrast, if we think of the poem as an ironic commentary on romantic self­-absorption, then the sigh signals straightfor­ward regret: The speaker is genuinely troubled by the consequences of every small choice he makes, and his preoccupation with his own decisions renders him slightly ridiculous. But neither of these explanations for the sigh seems espe­cially obscure, let alone “absolutely saving. ” Perhaps thats because both of them glide past a key point: The sigh hasnt yet occurred. Recall the final stanza: I took the one less traveled by, The speaker isnt “telling this with a sigh” now; hes say­ ing that hell be sighing “ages and ages hence. ” He knows himself well enough—or thinks he does—to predict how hell feel about the consequences of his choice in the future. But if he actually knows himself this well, then its reason­ able to ask whether he would, in fact, behave in the way hes suggesting. Which is to say that the speaker isnt necessarily the kind of person who sighs while explaining that many years ago he took the less traveled road; rather, hes the kind of person who thinks he would sigh while telling us this story. Hes assuming that hell do something that will strike others as either self­-congratulatory or paralyzingly anxious. Its a small difference, but as with so many small differ­ences in “The Road Not Taken, ” it matters a great deal. Be­cause it allows us to feel affectionate compassion toward the speaker, whom its now possible to view less as a boaster or a neurotic than as a person who is perhaps excessively critical of his own perceived failings. This feature of the poem goes strangely unremarked in most commentary, and even when its noted, it tends to be folded into one of the two standard interpretations. Writing in The New Yorker, for instance, the critic Dan Chiasson declares that the sigh represents “a later version of the self that this current version, though moving steadily in its direction, finds pitiable, ” and he declares the poem to be a “cunning nugget of nihilism. ” But ones self­ image is only rarely accurate in the moment, let alone as a predictor of future behavior, and the poem itself provides no reason to conclude the speaker is “moving steadily” toward anything. Were no more bound to take his view of himself at face value than we are to believe Emma Bovary or Willy Loman. Its important to remember that while “The Road Not Taken” isnt strictly “about” Edward Thomas, it was, at least, strongly associated with Thomas by Frost. And as the scholar Katherine Kearns rightly notes, Frost “by all accounts was genuinely fond of Thomas. ” Indeed, “Frosts protean ability to assume dramatic masks never elsewhere included such a friend as Thomas, whom he loved and admired, tellingly, more than ‘anyone in England or anywhere else in the world. ” If you admire someone more than anyone “any­ where else in the world, ” you probably arent going to link that person with a poem whose speaker comes off as either obnoxious or enfeebled. But you might well connect him with an exquisitely sensitive and self-­aware speaker who thinks of himself—probably incorrectly—as fundamentally weak, and likely to behave in ways that will cause others to lose patience. “But you know already how I waver, ” Thomas wrote to Frost in early 1914, and “on what wavering things I de­pend. ” This is the figure who emerges between the two more common interpretations of “The Road Not Taken, ” and his doubting yet ardent sensibility is the secret warmth of the poem. This is what is, or can be, “absolutely saving. ” Poetry has always oscillated between guardedness and fervor. The effusions of Dylan Thomas give way to the iro­nies of Philip Larkin; the reticence of Elizabeth Bishop yields to the frenzy of Sylvia Plath; the closed becomes open; the hot grows cold. In this system of binaries, Frost has gen­erally been regarded as not merely guarded, but practically encircled by battlements. In part this is a matter of tempera­ment: His refusal to commit to positions can seem princi­pled, in a roundabout way, but also evasive in a manner that Pounds Cantos, for all their difficulty, are not. There is a sense that, like Thomas Hardy, Frost sometimes saw himself as more allied with the impersonal forces often depicted in his poems than with the human characters those forces so frequently overwhelm. He isnt warm. He doesnt tell us what hes thinking. His poetry doesnt advertise its ambitions. “He presents, ” declares the introductory note on Frost in the second edition of The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, “an example of reserve or holding back in genre, diction, theme, and even philosophy, which is impressive but also, as seen after his death by a generation bent on extravagance, cautious. ” “Cautious”: not a word Frost would have liked. In his per­sonal life, he was anything but, as is demonstrated by his nearly monomaniacal courtship of his wife, to say nothing of his decision to move to England at age 38 on the basis of a coin toss. (He was much bolder in this regard than almost all of his modernist peers. And the word seems equally inapplicable to his strongest writing, which is audacious in its willingness to engage multiple audiences (and be judged by them) as well as in its determination to dis­play its technical wizardry in a way that was certain to be initially underestimated. It takes tremendous nerve to be willing to look as if you dont know what youre doing, when in fact youre a master of the activity in question. Even in 1915, for example, it was far from “cautious” for an ambi­tious poet to open his first book by deliberately rhyming “trees” with “breeze, ” a pairing so legendarily banal that it had been famously singled out for derision by Alexander Pope 200 years earlier. True, Frost became tremen­dously successful by writing in the way he did, but success in a tricky venture doesnt make the venture itself any less risky. Yet if the word “cautious” is wrong, its interestingly wrong. “The Road Not Taken” seems to be about the diffi­culty of decision making but is itself strangely reluctant to resolve. It keeps us in the woods, at the crossroads, unsure whether the speaker is actually even making a choice, and then ends not with the decision itself but with a claim about the future that seems unreliable. There is, in this sense, no road that “The Road Not Taken” fails to take. Is that desire to cover all possibilities “cautious”? Here its useful to turn to another poem from Frosts early career, “Reluctance. ” That poem ends: Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season? The conclusion of the poem is a protest against conclusions—an argument, you might say, for delay. But its not an argument for caution, even though caution and delay are intertwined. After all, a stubborn sensibility also delays. A playful sensibility delays. An arrogant sensibility de­lays, because it wont be rushed. And while Frost can claim the greatest self­-penned epitaph in the history of English­ language poetry—I HAD A LOVERS QUARREL WITH THE WORLD—it would have been no less accurate for his stone to have  read  STUBBORN, PLAYFUL, AND ARROGANT. Or even HE NEVER HURRIED. “The Road Not Taken” isnt a poem that radiates this sort of confidence, obviously. But there is an overlap between its hesitations and evasions and the extent to which Frost, as a poet, simply doesnt like to leave the page. Here is Frost from an interview with The Paris Review in 1960, talking about the act of writing: The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. Why dont critics talk about those things—what a feat it was to turn that that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this? Why dont they talk about that? Scoring. Youve got to score. Poetry is frequently (endlessly, tediously) compared to mu­sic, but only rarely does one see it compared to ice hockey. Yet here is Frost—“Youve got to score ”—doing exactly that. This is of a piece with his famous quip that writing free verse is “like playing tennis without a net, ” a bon mot that is probably more interesting for its underlying metaphor (poets, those sedentary creatures, are like sportsmen) than for its actual claim. There is a sinewy, keyed-­up athleti­cism to Frosts writing and, like all great athletes, hes reluc­tant to leave the field, which is, after all, the place hes most fully himself. Consider the end of his great love poem “To Earthward”: When stiff and sore and scarred I take away my hand From leaning on it hard In grass and sand, The hurt is not enough: I long for weight and strength To feel the earth as rough To all my length. Yes, these stanzas are about the hunger for sensation. But theyre also about delay: Frost wants to feel the friction of love through the “length” of his body, but also to the “length” of his days, and through the “length” of the poem. Not just more touch, but more time. And here is where Robert Frost and Edward Thomas (or Frosts idea of Thomas) are perhaps not so different. “The Road Not Taken” gives us several variations on the standard dilemmas associated with the romantic sensibility: How can one transcend ones self (“travel both”) while still remaining oneself (“And be one traveler”) How can one ever arrive anywhere if one is constantly reaching for something purer (“the one less traveled by”) What is the difference between the stories we tell about ourselves and the actuality of our inner lives? In the moment of choosing—the moment of delay—all answers to these questions remain equally possi­ble. But when a choice is made, other possibilities are fore­ closed, which leads to what Frost describes as “crying over what might have been. ” So the romantic embraces delay (“long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could”) because it postpones the inevitable loss. He hesitates like a candle flame wavers: hot but fragile, already wrapped in the smoke that will signal its extinction. Both Frost and the speaker of “The Road Not Taken, ” then, are attracted to the idea of prolonging the moment of decision making (achieving a “momentary stay against con­ fusion, ” as Frost would put it in a different context. The difference between them is one of attitude and degree. The speaker—and, by extension, Frosts conception of Thomas—is afraid of what hell lose when the process of choosing ends, so he pauses over nearly any choice. Frost is afraid of losing the process itself, so he pauses over a decision that might re­sult in genuine resolution—that might result, for instance, in a poem that is conclusive and immobile. He wants the ball to pass through the hoop, only to return to his hands, because for Frost the process—the continuation, the endless creation of endless roads—is everything. “No one, ” he writes, “can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. ” You dont just have to score; you have to keep scoring. But no game can continue forever. Frosts fascination with delay allows him to understand the romantic sensibility, to sympathize with its fear of closure, even if its preoccupa­tions arent his own. And this understanding lets him create his own version of romantic yearning. This being Frost, of course, that yearning has very little in it of the “sigh” from “The Road Not Taken, ” or the overt regret that animates it. But it has a road, and the consequences of that road. Here is the beginning of “Directive, ” from 1946, which is usually considered to be Frosts last great poem: Back out of all this now too much for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town. The road there, if youll let a guide direct you Who only has at heart your getting lost, May seem as if it should have been a quarry... The poem proceeds through a series of possible self­ deceptions that recall the potential self­-deceptions of “The Road Not Taken”: Make yourself up a cheering song of how Someones road home from work this once was, Who may be just ahead of you on foot. These in turn give way to a scene of homecoming that hovers somewhere between parody and pathos: Then make yourself at home. The only field Now lefts no bigger than a harness gall. First theres the childrens house of make-believe, Some shattered dishes underneath a pine, The playthings in the playhouse of the children. Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough. This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. And the poem famously concludes with a cross between a baptism and the Grail quest: I have kept hidden in the instep arch Of an old cedar at the waterside A broken drinking goblet like the Grail Under a spell so the wrong ones cant find it, So cant get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustnt. (I stole the goblet from the childrens playhouse. ) Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. As many critics have noted, “Directive” contains elements from dozens of Frosts earlier poems and critical pronouncements. But its rarely connected with “The Road Not Taken”; indeed, the two are more likely to be contrasted than linked. Writing in Slate, for example, Robert Pinsky asserts that “works like ‘The Road Not Taken do not unsettle or revise any 19th-­century notions of form or idea, ” whereas “Frosts greatest poems, such as ‘Directive and ‘The Most of It, do radically challenge and reimagine old conceptions of mem­ory, culture, and ways of beholding nature. ” Its easy to see why some readers think this way. “Direc­tive” looks and feels both contemporary and significant. It shifts from one scene to another with little warning, it uses a motley palette of tones rather than one dominant, reliable voice, its simultaneously rhetorical and punning (“no play­ house but a house in earnest”) and it drops  numerous hints that it should be categorized as a Major Work. When David Lehman, the editor of the Best American Poetry series, asked his guest editors—all eminent contemporary poets— to name the greatest American poems of the century, “Direc­tive” was one of three Frost poems to receive multiple votes. “The Road Not Taken” didnt make the list, although it was named Americas favorite poem by the thousands of readers who participated in Pinskys Favorite Poem Project. This is to be expected. “Directive” has become the poem that dedicated readers—the same readers who consider “The Road Not Taken” a minor, dark joke—most admire. “This is the poem, ” Frost told an early biographer, “that converted the other group [the followers of T. S. Eliot. There I rest my case. ” It makes sense, then, that “Directive” continues to impress Eliots heirs. Reading it, you feel that if John Ashbery were to write a Robert Frost poem, this is what it would sound like. And yet there is good reason to connect the much cele­brated “Directive” with the frequently derided “The Road Not Taken. ” “Directive” is the poem in which Frost makes his way back to the crossroads—but as an approximation of himself, not as a version of Edward Thomas. Its a poem about the aftermath of choice: It is Frosts version of the “sigh. ” In exploring the domestic tragedies that are often considered to be sources for the poems central images, Mark Richardson argues, “it is not going too far to say that in ‘Di­rective Frost returns to the scene of the crime, so to speak, and that he has come here to ask, in light of the patently ‘liturgical qualities of the poem, to be shriven. ” Richardson then quotes Reuben Brower, one of Frosts old students, who claims “Directive” is a return “to the beginning of his life and his poetry, but it is a return after having taken one road rather than another”—an echo from “The Road Not Taken” that is revealing even if unintentional. Both poems rely on the image of an unreliable road that is imperfectly understood by its traveler. “Directive” con­tains a guide, true, but that guide “only has at heart your getting lost” and may be understood not just as the poet lead­ing the reader, but as a past version of the same traveler guid­ ing the current version. (Read this way, in the line “Back out of all this now too much for us, ” the “us” becomes a variant of the royal “we. ”) But the most important overlap between the two poems occurs in the hypnotic concluding lines of “Directive. ” The guide tells us that he has hidden “a broken drinking goblet like the Grail” so that “the wrong ones cant find it. So cant get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustnt. ” Frost is referring to Mark 4:11–12, in which Jesus explains why he speaks in parables: And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hear­ing they may hear, and not understand; lest at anytime they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them. For Frost, these lines were equally applicable to poetry, which some people would simply never understand, and which even good readers needed to approach in the right way. A poem, then, becomes a way to separate an audience into factions. The same idea emerges in two ways in “The Road Not Taken. ” First, as discussed earlier, the speaker focuses solely on the amount of travel each road received (rather than on the roads relative steepness or narrowness and so forth) which means his selection between them involves separating himself from other people. The road isnt just a choice; its a choice premised on exclusion. Second, that choice is mir­rored in the larger subterfuges of the poem itself, in the way it encourages interpretations, only to undercut them, sepa­rating readers into those who thought they understood, oth­ers who thought those readers didnt understand, and so on in a nearly endless cycle. As Frost wrote to Louis Unter­meyer, “Ill bet not half a dozen people can tell who was hit and where he was hit by my Road Not Taken. ” But as weve seen, “who was hit and where he was hit” is nearly impossible to determine. This is because “The Road Not Taken” isnt a joke but a poem. A joke (or trick) has a right answer, but a poem only has answers that are better or worse—a point that is relevant to the most important con­nection between “Directive” and “The Road Not Taken. ” Recall the beginning of the latter poem: And be one traveler... And recall the conclusion of “Directive”: The poems final line is an overt reference to Frosts well­ known description of a successful poems ending as “a momentary stay against confusion. ” But why the word “whole”? And why “again”? The suggestion appears to be that the “you” of the poem, though previously one entity, has some­ how become divided. Divided, we might say, by the road taken. Divided when the process of choosing gives way to the fact of choice. From THE ROAD NOT TAKEN: FINDING AMERICA IN THE POEM EVERYONE LOVES AND ALMOST EVERYONE GETS WRONG. Used with permission of Penguin Press. Copyright 2015 by David Orr.

Critics Consensus No consensus yet. Tomatometer Not Yet Available TOMATOMETER Total Count: N/A Coming soon Release date: Mar 13, 2020 Audience Score Ratings: Not yet available The Roads Not Taken Ratings & Reviews Explanation The Roads Not Taken Videos Photos Movie Info Sally Potter's The Roads Not Taken follows a day in the life of Leo (Javier Bardem) and his daughter, Molly (Elle Fanning) as she grapples with the challenges of her father's chaotic mind. As they weave their way through New York City, Leo's journey takes on a hallucinatory quality as he floats through alternate lives he could have lived, leading Molly to wrestle with her own path as she considers her future. Rating: R (for language) Genre: Directed By: Written By: In Theaters: Mar 13, 2020 limited Runtime: 85 minutes Cast News & Interviews for The Roads Not Taken Critic Reviews for The Roads Not Taken There are no critic reviews yet for The Roads Not Taken. Keep checking Rotten Tomatoes for updates! Audience Reviews for The Roads Not Taken There are no featured reviews for The Roads Not Taken because the movie has not released yet (Mar 13, 2020. See Movies in Theaters The Roads Not Taken Quotes Movie & TV guides.

Movie watch the roads not taken youtube. Movie Watch The road not taken. Movie Watch The Roads Not taken. Movie watch the roads not taken cast. Movie watch the roads not taken 2017. Movie watch the roads not taken movie. Read this article to know about the summary and analysis of the poem  The Road Not Taken  by Robert Frost. Summary of The Road Not Taken Lines 1-2 “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood And sorry I could not travel both” The poet while travelling on foot in the woods reaches a junction where two roads diverge. Immediately, he realizes that as a traveller travelling both the roads is impossible. Here two roads are meant two ways of life. The woods are yellow, which means that it probably falls and the leaves are turning yellow. Lines 3-5 “And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;” As it is impossible to travel both the roads, the poet stands there trying to choose which path hes going to take. However, the poet wants to go down both paths and is thinking about it hard. He is staring down one road, trying to see where it goes. The small plants and greenery of the woods block his view. Lines 6-8 “Then took the other, as just as fair And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear, ” The phrase could mean something like “as just as it is fair, ” as in proper, righteous and equal. But this doesnt quite apply to a road. “As just as fair” is an example of a simile. Then the poet decided to check the other path because he found the other road to be less travelled and grassy one. “Wanted wear” is an example of personification. Lines 9-10 “Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same, ” After travelling through the road, he found that both the roads are equally travelled. First, he found the first road to be the more travelled one, but then he says that both the roads to be equally travelled. The ‘as for that” refers to the path being less worn. Lines 11-12 “And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. ” Here, again, the poet found both the paths looking same. Perhaps, he goes in the flashback. It was tough for him to recognize the real road as in the morning he was the first person to walk on the road. He couldnt decide the right path as no step had smashed the leaves on the roads to allow him to go for the right one. These lines are an example of imagery. Lines 13-15 “Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. ” The poet here saves the first road for another day. He knows how “way leads” to another, and then another until you end up very far from where you started. The poet here saves the first road for another day. Then in the third, he doesnt think he will ever be able to come back and take the other path, as much as he wishes he could. Line 16 “I shall be telling this with a sigh” This line is the example of the poets failure in choosing the right path. The word ‘sigh reflects that he is disappointed with the decision. Lines 17-19 “Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood and I- I took the one less traveled by, ” He accepts the fact that he is a failure in taking the right decision. ‘ Ages and ages is an example of alliteration. Perhaps, he chose the less travelled one. Line 20 “And that has made all the difference. ” The poet took the path that no one else did, and that is what has made the difference in his life that made him successful. However, a “difference” could mean success or utter failure. Analysis The poem The Road Not Taken is made with a rhyme scheme of ABAAB. The poet in the poem decided to seize the day and express himself as an individual by choosing the road that was “less traveled by. ” Moreover, the narrators decision to choose the “less-travelled” path shows his courage. In terms of the beauty, both paths are equally “fair”. The narrator only distinguishes the paths from one another after he has already selected one and travelled for many years through life. The Road Not Taken is one of Frosts most beloved poems and is frequently studied in high school literature classes. Play Quiz.

1 nomination. See more awards  » Production Notes from IMDbPro Status: Completed, See complete list of in-production titles  » Updated: 7 February 2019 More Info: See more production information about this title on IMDbPro. Edit Storyline Sally Potter's THE ROADS NOT TAKEN follows a day in the life of Leo (Javier Bardem) and his daughter, Molly (Elle Fanning) as she grapples with the challenges of her father's chaotic mind. As they weave their way through New York City, Leo's journey takes on a hallucinatory quality as he floats through alternate lives he could have lived, leading Molly to wrestle with her own path as she considers her future. Plot Summary Add Synopsis Details Release Date: 13 March 2020 (USA) See more  » Also Known As: Company Credits Technical Specs See full technical specs  » Did You Know? Trivia The original film of the name was slated to be "Molly" See more ».

Road Not Taken by Spry Fox is a turn-based roguelike puzzler for PC, Mac, Sony PlayStation 4, and Vita. As a freelance ranger, you are charged with rescuing children from a dark winter woods. Rearrange the contents of each room to group like items, opening the path deeper into the forest. Or combine different items to craft new equipment necessary to keep your ranger alive. Road Not Taken starts off easy, but its 16 levels quickly ramp up in difficulty. It wasn't long before I found myself cornered by forest spirits, lacking the stamina and mobility to move trees or fires out of the way. I interviewed game designer Pat Kemp of Spry Fox to ask not only for some advice, but what how this game was inspired by the Robert Frost poem, why it splits its time between forest puzzler and village simulator, and how its checkpoint system builds on the legacy of Rogue. Download Road Not Taken for PC or Mac from Steam. IndieSider pairs Let's Plays of indie games with developer interviews. New episodes air every other Wednesday and can be found in video format on YouTube or as an audio podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play Music, Mixcloud, Spoke, Overcast, acast, Pocket Casts, Castbox, TuneIn, or RadioPublic. Podcast: Download (Duration: 24:14 — 12. 9MB. Embed Subscribe: Apple Podcasts, Android, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, RSS.
By Robert Frost 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. Living Nature Poet Bio Robert Frost is considered the bard of New England. Casual readers sometimes overlook the depth of his poetry and its technical accomplishment. His apparently simple poems — collected in volumes from A Boys Will to In the Clearing — reveal a darker heart upon close reading, and his easy conversational style is propelled by an unfaltering meter and an assiduous sensitivity to the sounds of language. See More By This Poet More By This Poet Mowing There was never a sound beside the wood but one, And that was my long scythe whispering to the ground. What was it it whispered? I knew not well myself; Perhaps it was something about the heat of the sun, Something, perhaps, about the... Activities Acquainted with the Night I have been one acquainted with the night. I have walked out in rain—and back in rain. I have outwalked the furthest city light. I have looked down the saddest city lane. I have passed by the watchman on his beat And dropped my eyes. More Poems about Living Dragons We gathered in a field southwest of town, several hundred hauling coolers and folding chairs along a gravel road dry in August, two ruts of soft dust that soaked into our clothes and rose in plumes behind us. By noon we could discern their massive coils emerging... By Devin Johnston Mythology & Folklore How to Triumph Like a Girl I like the lady horses best, how they make it all look easy, like running 40 miles per hour is as fun as taking a nap, or grass. I like their lady horse swagger, after winning. Ears up, girls, ears up! But mainly, lets be honest. By Ada Limón Browse poems about Living More Poems about Nature Sestina in Prose It was like climbing a mountain to those of us whod climbed one. To the others, it was like, I suppose, something else. In other words, we let everybody find her own figure of speech. Not that it—speech—lay thick on the... By Katharine Coles Arts & Sciences Browse poems about Nature.
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.

Movie Watch The Roads Not taken on 2009. Enter the characters you see below Sorry, we just need to make sure you're not a robot. For best results, please make sure your browser is accepting cookies. Type the characters you see in this image: Try different image Conditions of Use Privacy Policy 1996-2014, Inc. or its affiliates. Movie watch the roads not taken online. English. that Library where every book shall lie open to one another. Which of these is the best interpretation of this phrase from John Donne's Meditation 17? A:It is a description of Death. B:It is a description of God C:It is a asked by Anonymous on January 3, 2018 English In "The Road Not Taken. the description of the wood as yellow A. tells us the wood is very young, not yet full grown. B. makes the setting seem churchlike. C. tells us the scene is taking place at noon. D. helps us see the scene asked by Anonymous on March 7, 2019 LA 1. In "The Road Not Taken. the description of the wood as yellow (1 point) tells us the wood is very young, not yet full grown. helps us see the scene asked by PLZ. CHECK MY WOK~LA on February 25, 2015 Language Arts 1. In "The Road Not Taken" the description of the wood as yellow A. tells us the scene is taking place in noon. helps us see the asked by Calie on February 11, 2015 In "The Road Not Taken. the description of the wood as yellow A: tells us the wood is very young, not yet full grown. B: makes the setting seem church-like. C: tells us the scene is taking place at noon. D: helps us see the scene asked by No-One-Important on May 12, 2015 world issues I have been looking every where for a volunteer program description. I have read my book and look on the internet and still do not understand can someone show me how to find a sample volunteer program description that works with asked by RT on April 14, 2012 earth Geological time scale summary for stone mountain's granite in georgia, with: description of the Feature Description of Processes Influence of Time on Rock Formation Discussion of Transformation processes Hand Samples Location asked by Robin on February 7, 2011 please help so my intervention is how i'm going to reduce air pollution like convincing people to walk and ride bikes etc. and then how people are also trying to help reduce pollution? Ecology Intervention Project - Reina B., Saturday, asked by Reina B. on October 20, 2013 English 4 what point Gordimer is trying to illustrate through the contrast in “The Train from Rhodesia” between the description of the wooden figures and the description of the begging children. I need help with this. asked by Ciara on April 28, 2015 english what point Gordimer is trying to illustrate through the contrast in “The Train from Rhodesia” between the description of the wooden figures and the description of the begging children asked by Anonymous on April 22, 2017.

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.

Robert Frost wrote “ The Road Not Taken ” as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas. When they went walking together, Thomas was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and—in retrospect—often lamented that they should, in fact, have taken the other one. Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been “taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. … Mea culpa. ” However, Frost liked to quip, “Im never more serious than when joking. ” As his joke unfolds, Frost creates a multiplicity of meanings, never quite allowing one to supplant the other—even as “The Road Not Taken” describes how choice is inevitable. “The Road Not Taken” begins with a dilemma, as many fairytales do. Out walking, the speaker comes to a fork in the road and has to decide which path to follow: 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 … In his description of the trees, Frost uses one detail—the yellow leaves—and makes it emblematic of the entire forest. Defining the wood with one feature prefigures one of the essential ideas of the poem: the insistence that a single decision can transform a life. The yellow leaves suggest that the poem is set in autumn, perhaps in a section of woods filled mostly with alder or birch trees. The leaves of both turn bright yellow in fall, distinguishing them from maple leaves, which flare red and orange. Both birches and alders are “pioneer species, ” the first trees to come back after the land has been stripped bare by logging or forest fires. An inveterate New England farmer and woodsman, Robert Frost would have known these woods were “new”—full of trees that had grown after older ones had been decimated. One forest has replaced another, just as—in the poem—one choice will supplant another. The yellow leaves also evoke a sense of transience; one season will soon give way to another. The speaker briefly imagines staving off choice, wishing he could “travel both / And be one traveler. ” (A fastidious editor might flag the repetition of travel / traveler here, but it underscores the fantasy of unity—traveling two paths at once without dividing or changing the self. The syntax of the first stanza also mirrors this desire for simultaneity: three of the five lines begin with the word and. After peering down one road as far as he can see, the speaker chooses to take the other one, which he describes 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. Later in the poem, the speaker calls the road he chose “less traveled, ” and it does initially strike him as slightly grassier, slightly less trafficked. As soon as he makes this claim, however, he doubles back, erasing the distinction even as he makes it: “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same. ” Frost then reiterates that the two roads are comparable, observing—this time—that the roads are equally untraveled, carpeted in newly fallen yellow leaves: And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. The poem masquerades as a meditation about choice, but the critic William Pritchard suggests that the speaker is admitting that “choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had ‘perhaps the better claim. ” In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions. Having made his choice, the speaker declares, “Oh, I kept the first for another day! ” The diction up until now has been matter-of-fact, focusing on straightforward descriptions and avoiding figurative language. This line initiates a change: as the speaker shifts from depiction to contemplation, the language becomes more stilted, dramatic, and old-fashioned. This tonal shift subtly illustrates the idea that the concept of choice is, itself, a kind of artifice. Thus far, the entire poem has been one sentence. The meandering syntax of this long sentence—which sprawls across stanzas, doubling back on itself, revising its meaning, and delaying the finality of decisiveness—mirrors the speakers thought process as he deliberates. The neatness of how the sentence structure suddenly converges with the line structure (this sentence is exactly one line) echoes the sudden, clean division that choice creates. As the tone becomes increasingly dramatic, it also turns playful and whimsical. “Oh, I kept the first for another day! ” sounds like something sighed in a parlor drama, comic partly because it is more dramatic than the occasion merits: after all, the choice at hand is not terribly important. Whichever road he chooses, the speaker, will, presumably, enjoy a walk filled with pleasant fall foliage. The poems tone also turns increasingly eerie, elusive, and difficult to grasp. As he does throughout the poem, the speaker makes a confident statement (“I saved the first for another day! ”) only to turn back and revise it: Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. Already, the speaker doubts hell ever return. Writing, as he was, for his friend Edward Thomas, Frost was perhaps thinking of one of Thomass most famous poems, “ Roads. ” Thomas, who was Welsh, lived in a country where roads built by the Romans two millennia previously were (and are) still in use. Some, now paved over, are used as highways, remnants of a culture that has long since vanished and been supplanted by another. In “Roads, ” Thomas writes,   Roads go on While we forget, and are Forgotten like a star That shoots and is gone. Later he imagines roads when people are absent: They are lonely While we sleep, lonelier For lack of the traveller Who is now a dream only. “The Road Not Taken” appears as a preface to Frosts Mountain Interval, which was published in 1916 when Europe was engulfed in World War I; the United States would enter the war a year later. Thomass “Roads” evokes the legions of men who will return to the roads they left only as imagined ghosts: Now all roads lead to France And heavy is the tread Of the living; but the dead Returning lightly dance. Frost wrote this poem at a time when many men doubted they would ever go back to what they had left. Indeed, shortly after receiving this poem in a letter, Edward Thomas's Army regiment was sent to Arras, France, where he was killed two months later. When Frost sent the poem to Thomas, Thomas initially failed to realize that the poem was (mockingly) about him. Instead, he believed it was a serious reflection on the need for decisive action. (He would not be alone in that assessment. ) Frost was disappointed that the joke fell flat and wrote back, insisting that the sigh at the end of the poem was “a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of the thing. ” The joke rankled; Thomas was hurt by this characterization of what he saw as a personal weakness—his indecisiveness, which partly sprang from his paralyzing depression. Thomas presciently warned Frost that most readers would not understand the poems playfulness and wrote, “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. ” Edward Thomas was right, and the critic David Orr has hailed “The Road Not Taken” as a poem that “at least in its first few decades … came close to being reader-proof. ” The last stanza—stripped of the poems earlier insistence that the roads are “really about the same”—has been hailed as a clarion call to venture off the beaten path and blaze a new trail. Frosts lines have often been read as a celebration of individualism, an illustration of Emersons claim that “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. ” In the film Dead Poets Society, the iconoclastic teacher Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, takes his students into a courtyard, instructs them to stroll around, and then observes how their individual gaits quickly subside into conformity. He passionately tells them, “Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference. ” Far from being an ode to the glories of individualism, however, the last stanza is a riddling, ironic meditation on how we turn bewilderment and impulsiveness into a narrative: 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. Again, the language is stylized, archaic, and reminiscent of fairytales. Frost claims he will be telling the story “somewhere ages and ages hence, ” a reversal of the fairytale beginning, “Long, long ago in a faraway land. ” Through its progression, the poem suggests that our power to shape events comes not from choices made in the material world—in an autumn stand of birches—but from the minds ability to mold the past into a particular story. The roads were about the same, and the speakers decision was based on a vague impulse. The act of assigning meanings—more than the inherent significance of events themselves—defines our experience of the past. The fairytale-like language also accentuates the way the poem slowly launches into a conjuring trick. Frost liked to warn listeners (and readers) that “you have to be careful of that one; its a tricky poem—very tricky. ” Part of its trick is that it enacts what it has previously claimed is impossible: the traveling of two roads at once. The poems ending refuses to convey a particular emotional meaning; it playfully evades categorizations even as it describes divisions created by choices. Its triumph is that it does travel two emotional trajectories while cohering as a single statement. We cannot tell, ultimately, whether the speaker is pleased with his choice; a sigh can be either contented or regretful. The speaker claims that his decision has made “all the difference, ” but the word difference itself conveys no sense of whether this choice made the speakers life better or worse—he could, perhaps, be envisioning an alternate version of life, one full of the imagined pleasures the other road would have offered. Indeed, when Frost and Thomas went walking together, Thomas would often choose one fork in the road because he was convinced it would lead them to something, perhaps a patch of rare wild flowers or a particular birds nest. When the road failed to yield the hoped-for rarities, Thomas would rue his choice, convinced the other road would have doubtless led to something better. In a letter, Frost goaded Thomas, saying, “No matter which road you take, youll always sigh, and wish youd taken another. ” And, indeed, the title of the poem hovers over it like a ghost: “The Road Not Taken. ” According to the title, this poem is about absence. It is about what the poem never mentions: the choice the speaker did not make, which still haunts him. Again, however, Frost refuses to allow the title to have a single meaning: “The Road Not Taken” also evokes “the road less traveled, ” the road most people did not take. The poem moves from a fantasy of staving off choice to a statement of division. The reader cannot discern whether the “difference” evoked in the last line is glorious or disappointing—or neither. What is clear is that the act of choosing creates division and thwarts dreams of simultaneity.  All the “difference” that has arisen—the loss of unity—has come from the simple fact that choice is always and inescapably inevitable. The repetition of I —as well as heightening the rhetorical drama—mirrors this idea of division. The self has been split. At the same time, the repetition of I recalls the idea of traveling two roads as one traveler: one I stands on each side of the line break—on each side of the verses turn—just as earlier when the speaker imagined being a single traveler walking down both roads at once. The poem also wryly undercuts the idea that division is inevitable: the language of the last stanza evokes two simultaneous emotional stances. The poem suggests that—through language and artifice—we can “trick” our way out of abiding by the law that all decisions create differences. We can be one linguistic traveler traveling two roads at once, experiencing two meanings. In a letter, Frost claimed, “My poems … are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. ” The meaning of this poem has certainly tripped up many readers—from Edward Thomas to the iconic English teacher in Dead Poets Society. But the poem does not trip readers simply to tease them—instead it aims to launch them into the boundless, to launch them past spurious distinctions and into a vision of unbounded simultaneity. Originally Published: May 27th, 2016 Katherine Robinson earned a BA from Amherst College, an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, Poet Lore, The Common and elsewhere. Her critical interests include the influence of mythology and bardic poetry on contemporary...

The Roads Not Taken Theatrical release poster Directed by Sally Potter Produced by Christopher Sheppard Written by Sally Potter Starring Javier Bardem Elle Fanning Salma Hayek Laura Linney Music by Sally Potter Cinematography Robbie Ryan [1] Edited by Sally Potter Jason Rayton Emilie Orsini Production companies BBC Films HanWay Films British Film Institute Ingenious Media Chimney Pot Sverige AB Adventure Pictures Film i Väst Distributed by Bleecker Street Focus Features Release date February 26, 2020 ( Berlin) March 13, 2020 (United States) May 1, 2020 (United Kingdom) Running time 85 minutes [2] Country United States United Kingdom Sweden Language English The Roads Not Taken is an upcoming British-American drama film written and directed by Sally Potter. It stars Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek and Laura Linney. It will have its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 26, 2020. It is scheduled to be released on March 13, 2020, by Bleecker Street. Cast [ edit] Javier Bardem as Leo Elle Fanning as Molly Salma Hayek as Dolores Branka Katić as Xenia Laura Linney as Rita Production [ edit] In December 2018, it was announced Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek and Laura Linney had joined the cast of the film, with Sally Potter directing and writing from a screenplay she wrote. Christopher Sheppard will produce under his Adventure Pictures banner, while BBC Films, HanWay Films, British Film Institute, Ingenious Media, Chimney Pot, Sverige AB, Adventure Pictures and Film i Väst will produce. Bleecker Street will distribute. Production began that same month. [3] Release [ edit] In September 2019, it was announced Focus Features had acquired international distribution rights to the film outside of the U. S. [4] It will have its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival on February 26, 2020. [5] 6] It is scheduled to be released in the United States on March 13, 2020. [7] References [ edit] "Robbie Ryan" PDF. Gersh. Retrieved March 27, 2019. ^ The Roads Not Taken. Berlin International Film Festival. Retrieved February 11, 2020. ^ Grater, Tom (December 10, 2018. Javier Bardem, Elle Fanning, Salma Hayek to star in Sally Potter drama. Screen International. Retrieved December 10, 2018. ^ Wiseman, Andreas (September 18, 2019. Focus Pre-Buys Key Int'l Territories On Sally Potter Drama 'Molly' Starring Javier Bardem & Elle Fanning; HanWay Closes Most Of World. Deadline Hollywood. Retrieved September 18, 2019. ^ The 70th Berlinale Competition and Further Films to Complete the Berlinale Special. Berlinale. Retrieved 29 January 2020. ^ Berlin Competition Lineup Revealed: Sally Potter, Kelly Reichardt, Eliza Hittman, Abel Ferrara. Variety. Retrieved 29 January 2020. ^ Lang, Brent (October 25, 2019. Bleecker Street Buys Harvey Weinstein-Inspired Drama 'The Assistant. Retrieved October 25, 2019. External links [ edit] The Roads Not Taken on IMDb.

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