How Has Frost's "The Road Not Taken" Been Misinterpreted?

My son the English major has pointed out that the way “The Road Not Taken” is usually interpreted is just wrong. How many posters, and e-mail sign-offs, and titles of sophomore term papers say “Take the road less traveled” or “I took the road less traveled” or “Be your own person; take the less-traveled road” or whatever? The poem is seen as a paean to independence and freedom, to being your own person. But folks, that ain’t what it says at all!

So let’s parse this out. The speaker in the poem (who isn’t necessarily the same person as the poet himself) is out for a walk in the woods. He gets to a fork in the road and has to decide which direction to take. He regrets that he can’t take both of them and still remain one traveler; in other words, he’d like to travel both at once but knows he can’t. So he stands there for awhile trying to decide between them. The first bends “in the undergrowth” so that he can’t see all that far as he peers down it; the other is somewhat grassier, showing that fewer people have gone that way. But here’s the important phrase: “though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same.” When it comes right down to it, the roads don’t have much of a difference between them. He has to make a choice and there isn’t a great deal to go on. So, almost at random, he picks the slightly-less-traveled way, hoping that maybe some day he’ll be able to come back and explore the other branch but “knowing how way leads on to way” he doubts that will ever happen. And indeed he doesn’t ever come back, it seems. Instead, he tells us with a sigh, taking that less-traveled road made all the difference. Is it a sad sigh or a contented one? We don’t know. Is the difference his choice made good or bad? We don’t know. And what’s all this about “ages and ages hence”? People don’t live for ages and ages. So is he postulating some sort of existence after death when he can look back on his life and evaluate it? Maybe. We don’t know. He doesn’t tell us. There’s clearly symbolism going on here, but Frost doesn’t explain it. He wants us to come up with our own interpretations.

One couplet that gets hardly any attention is my favorite part:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

Frost must be envisioning an autumn day (since it’s a “yellow wood”), with fallen leaves spread over a perhaps muddy path so that any footsteps would show up as black. No one has walked on either path for quite some time and so the leaves are undisturbed. Notice how he’s emphasizing the two paths’ similarities, not their differences. He can’t even say, “Oh look–someone has already gone down this path, so I’ll take the other.” It’s an almost eerie scene, with no other people or creatures, perhaps a breeze slightly ruffling the leaves, and no clue about where to go.

For my own take, I would say that I love thinking about how one small action could have made “all the difference,” especially in great historical events. Think about how different US history would have been if someone involved with JFK’s trip to Dallas in 1963 had decided on a different route, one that didn’t go by the Texas School Book Depository. Or if Lee Harvey Oswald had happened not to bother reading the newspaper showing that route. Or, on a more personal note, if you had decided to go to a party and there you’d met your future spouse. Now there would be people alive in the world who wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t done that; there would be different people, because you probably would have married someone else. And those different people would have different descendants. Isn’t that just the coolest thing to think about? Well, I used to teach history and love studying such things, so I’m fascinated. And don’t you think that the poem is a lot more interesting than your high-school English teacher made it out to be? (I can make fun of high-school English teachers since I was one myself for many years.)

The most famous setting of this poem is in Randall Thompson’s Frostiana, a set of seven Frost poems written in 1959 to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the founding of Amherst MA. Here’s a performance of this song on its own and not as part of Frostiana as a whole:

Here’s a good presentation on the background of the poem, something I ran across after writing the above. The presenter agrees with my theory about the poem and goes even further in his analysis, filling in quite a bit of background about Frost’s motivation for the poem:

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.

I’ll add something else here at the end that didn’t seem to fit anywhere in the article itself: this poem isn’t the only for which Frost’s meaning has been badly misconstrued. One other very obvious example of this situation is his “Mending Wall,” with the line “good fences make good neighbors.” How many times has that saying been used, even in talking about literal fences and neighbors? In reality, the words are said by the speaker’s neighbor, who insists that every spring the two of them meet and repair the stone wall that runs along the border of their respective properties. Frost, or the speaker, thinks that the whole process is unnecessary, with his first line being: “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” All through the poem he’s rather mocking about his neighbor’s insistence on the repairs, while the neighbor can only insist, stolidly and unimaginatively, the “good fences” line, one that he learned from his father. Take a look and see what you think!