Frost, the Boss, and some really dangerous women

By By Randy Koch

Between matches at the volleyball tournament held at Cigarroa High last May, I went to Wendy's on Highway 83 with some of the girls playing on the Sirens, the team my daughter Mary was playing on, and with a couple of other parents. We sat at a long table, and while the girls ate their sandwiches, one of the parents asked, "Why the 'Sirens'?"
Mary explained that sirens are from Greek mythology. "They were these women, and if sailors listened to their singing, they ended up being destroyed."
"Really?" Janice said. She leaned forward and held her elbows in her hands and then picked up a french fry and pushed it in her mouth. "I thought it just meant a siren, like wooo, wooo, wooo. You know -- like on a police car." And she laughed.
"Me, too," Alma said and nodded. She wore a white tee shirt with "J. B. Alexander" and a volleyball ripping through a net printed on the front.
Amanda, a sophomore with smiling eyes, sat at the far end of the table next to Alma. She raised her eyebrows and looked at Janice. "Really? You didn't know what sirens were?"
Janice shook her head. "English is my worst subject," she said. "I just don't get that stuff. Like reading poetry. We'll be talking about a poem in class, and everybody will be pointing out all this stuff and how this means this and that means that, and I never see any of it."
"I know," Alma said. "The only poem I ever got was that one by Robert Frost -- 'The Road Not Taken.' At least I could figure out what that one means."
The conversation went on, we finished eating, and eventually went back to the tournament. But later that afternoon I found myself still thinking about what the girls said about not understanding poetry. And I was pretty sure I knew what Alma thought Robert Frost's poem meant because students at LCC sometimes mentioned this one in my classes. "The Road Not Taken" is commonly anthologized in high school texts, taught in English classes at all levels, and too often quoted, particularly the last three lines, by speakers at high school commencement exercises. The poem ends like this:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Most students, many teachers, and the graduation speakers see these lines as a synopsis of the first three stanzas and interpret them as an exhortation to not follow the crowd but to march to the beat of one's own drummer, which, in turn, will have a positive effect on one's life. It's a lovely sentiment and convenient for a graduation speaker, but like so many things we take for granted, this interpretation of Frost's poem is simply wrong. It's not that they've misunderstood these three lines but that they've ignored the context within which these lines are spoken. And herein lies the problem: many people, even many well-educated people, don't really understand how to read a poem.
The most common mistake people make is assuming that the poet is the speaker in the poem. However, the poet is strictly the writer, and as such he or she can create a character (much as a fiction writer does in a story with a first-person narrator) to speak the poem. Readers who assume otherwise are blind to much of what is suggested or stated because they assume that the speaker is this wise, infallible, trustworthy poet who, through the poem, imparts some of his or her wisdom. It never occurs to them that the speaker could be ignorant, immature, prejudiced, uneducated, sad, angry, dishonest, violent, even drunk. The speaker can be anyone or any type of person that the poet has imagined, someone useful in creating a situation and making meaning for the reader. Let's look again at Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken," to see how this can help us better understand it. Here, first, is the entire 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 is 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.

Remember-the poet is not the speaker. The speaker, however, is someone else whom we'll try to identify from the things he or she says. This can be done by looking for clues about the speaker and when and where he or she speaks. First, because gender sometimes makes a difference, ask yourself, "Is the speaker male or female?" Since the poem is in first person, which means that the speaker uses "I" to identify herself or himself, and because no else talks to the speaker in dialogue or gives the speaker's name or uses a pronoun (like "he" or "she"), and because the speaker calls him- or herself a "traveler," something either gender could be, we can't be sure if the speaker is male or female. Too many readers assume that a male speaks since Frost, a male, wrote the poem, but do you see anything in the poem that clearly excludes the possibility of a woman speaking? Since Frost, the poet, is ambiguous on the issue of gender, something he may have done to make the poem equally appealing and relevant to all people, not just male travelers, let's assume for the time being that the speaker could be male or female.
Next, let's consider the speaker's age, something we can look at in any poem but which seems particularly relevant here because so many readers view this as a poem about making decisions when we're young. The poem starts out in past tense, something we notice in the first line with the word "diverged," and continues in the past through the first three stanzas. Again, the past tense verbs throughout -- "stood," "looked," "bent," "took," "was," "wanted," "had," "kept," and "doubted" -- make it clear that the speaker is looking back on an event, but we can't tell how long ago it occurred. However, the fourth stanza begins, "I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence." At this point the speaker looks into the future and imagines what he or she might say years from now. This, of course, suggests that the speaker is relatively young since old age is said to be "ages and ages hence." So he or she is between two events -- pausing in the woods to choose one of two paths and much later in life telling someone else about that event. In the poem the first three stanzas are remembered and the last foretold.
Once you've given some thought to whom the speaker of the poem is and when and where he or she speaks, you can look closely at what the speaker says. Go line by line, use a dictionary for unfamiliar words or those that might have more than one meaning, and pay attention to where sentences -- not lines -- begin and end and to the punctuation used. To help you understand what the poem says, you might try restating it in your own words, one stanza or one sentence or one complete thought at a time. Let's look at what the speaker of Frost's poem (whom, for simplicity's sake, I'll refer to as "he") says. In the first stanza it's clear that he's been walking on a road through some woods, probably in the fall since he says the "wood" is "yellow." When the road "diverged," or split, he paused, "and looked down one" of the two paths as he tried to decide which way to go but realized that since he's only "one traveler" with one life he can choose only one path on this day.
In stanza two he says he took the other path, the one that few people had taken since "it was grassy and wanted wear," which fits with the title and the three oft-quoted lines about avoiding the beaten path. However, what many people ignore in this stanza and the next is that he says that both paths are the same. In line 6 of the poem he says he "took the other, as just as fair," which means it was just as good or promising as the one he "looked down," and in lines 9 and 10 he explains that "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." There is no difference between the two paths; the one has been taken as often as the other.
The first two lines of stanza three remind us of two things already said earlier in the poem -- first, that the paths are the same -- "both that morning equally lay" -- and second, that it's autumn -- "In leaves no step had trodden black." It's important to recognize that for the third time in the last six lines the speaker has made it clear that the two paths are, as far as he could see, the same. Then, he recalls thinking that someday he'd come back and take the first path to see what lay in that direction, but he knew how things would go -- that life gets busy or complicated, and it becomes impossible to go back and do things that he once wanted to do. This, then, is the end of the speaker's recollection.
In the last stanza the speaker imagines relating this experience to someone -- maybe to friends or relatives, maybe to grandchildren -- when he's old -- "ages and ages hence." The colon at the end of the second line indicates that he imagines saying what follows: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." The strange thing here is that he foresees himself not just exaggerating but lying about this event and doing so dramatically "with a sigh" and with a heavy pause at the end of line three ("and I -- / I took. . ."). Three times he said that the two paths were the same, but he imagines telling someone in the future that "one [was] less traveled by" and that it was his decision to take this one that "made all the difference." He gives himself credit for a decision that could as easily have been made by flipping a coin. The question for the reader is, of course, what does all this mean?
Before I try to answer that, there's one more thing we can and should look at as we try to understand this or any poem. We've examined who's speaking and what he or she says; now let's look at how it's said. By "how" I mean the form of the poem or its structure. This can include many things, among them lines per stanza, length of lines, meter, number of stanzas, end-stopped and enjambed lines, spacing, etc. And keep in mind that form in good poetry should always have a logical connection to the content or meaning of the poem. If, for example, the poem is about chaos, the structure of the poem should be somewhat chaotic whereas if the poem is about something that has order, like a baseball game, the poem should have some order -- maybe nine lines or nine stanzas for the nine innings in a regulation game. I don't want to try to dissect Frost's poem for all of these things here, so let's focus on one obvious and important aspect of form -- rhyme scheme.
To examine rhyme scheme, we look at the pattern of rhyming words at the ends of the lines in each stanza. Since the last word of lines 1, 3 and 4 rhyme ("wood," "stood," and "could"), and the last word of lines 2 and 5 rhyme ("both" and "undergrowth"), we indicate the rhyme scheme using lower case letters like this: a b a a b. The a's stand for the words that rhyme with "wood" and the b's for the words that rhyme with "both." Notice that the pattern doesn't change as we move from the past in the first three stanzas to the future in the last stanza-in each, lines 1, 3, and 4 rhyme, and lines 2 and 5 rhyme. There are no differences here just as there are no differences in the two roads in the poem, and, it might also be implied, there is no difference in the speaker. Despite what he says about that one event having "made all the difference," he has not changed nor, as he imagines himself in the future, does he expect himself to change. In this way the form of the poem is a reflection of the content or meaning of the poem.
At first, a poem can and should be read literally; we should take what the speaker says at face value and try to understand it at that level. But once we've done that, it's worth looking further, as we do with those computer-generated 3-D images where on the surface there's just a repetitive pattern of color and design, but behind it, when we change our focus, fighter jets or dinosaurs appear so three-dimensional that we feel we could reach out and touch them When reading a poem, we need to ask not only if we can accept what the speaker says literally but also if the images and events in the poem are symbolic, much as a red rose given by a man to a woman symbolizes his passion and love for her. He doesn't have to say the words; the rose says it all. One of the fairly obvious things about Frost's poem is that the "two roads" in the wood can literally be roads on which one walks or travels, but they can also be understood metaphorically. This is why so many people use this poem in graduation speeches. The roads can symbolize the paths from which we all choose during our lives -- the path to college vs. the path to work, the solitary path vs. the path of marriage and family, the path of honesty and hard work vs. the path of dishonesty and laziness, etc. Viewed this way, the question becomes, "What is Frost suggesting by having the speaker of the poem foresee himself lying about the source of his good fortune later in life, saying that 'all the difference' resulted from choosing to take 'the one less traveled by' when he already told us three times that they were traveled the same?"
One possible explanation is that Frost, unlike the young speaker in the poem, isn't really interested in the trite cliché about taking the road "less traveled." Instead, his focus is on people, in this case the young -- whom the speaker symbolizes -- and on how they perceive whom and what they are now and will be later. Maybe Frost is showing us that nature -- symbolized by "a yellow wood," "the undergrowth," and the "leaves" -- and human nature -- the intuitive, less logical side of our consciousness -- to a large extent determine how we turn out and whether we have good or bad fortune. Despite people's logic and good intentions, they are, Frost claims, egotistical and anxious to take credit for successes in which they played little or no role. Maybe Frost is suggesting that nature is generally beneficent and that people are, too; it's just our egos that keep us from realizing it.
One other possibility: maybe the poem is a sort of test that Frost created to help the reader measure his or her own maturity and degree of self-centeredness. Maybe he's suggesting that readers who only see that dull, little nugget of wisdom at the end -- "I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference" -- have also allowed themselves to be lied to by the persona and, as a result, are as immature or inexperienced as the speaker. Similarly, he might also be suggesting that those who perceive that the speaker is deluding himself are wiser and more insightful as the speaker may well be "ages and ages hence" despite what he predicts he'll say when he's that old. I know what you're thinking -- "Yeah, that Koch is just making this poetry more complicated than it really is because then he can call all of us 'immature' and make himself look like he's smarter and 'wiser.'" Okay, it looks that way, but that's not my point; I'm only trying to demonstrate that what you think you see isn't necessarily what you get. If we become more thoughtful, more careful readers, our entire reading experience will change just as we and our perception of the poems we read will change.
I hope you don't see this as something new because it's not. We interpret people's actions everyday -- a punch on the shoulder can be aggressive or friendly, an embrace can be romantic or intended to console, a whistle can be complimentary or wolfish -- and our interpretation depends on context. The willingness to look beyond the surface and to reach conclusions is a natural and necessary part of our lives and can make our participation in a literary life richer as well. Consider one last example: many people think that Bruce Springsteen's well-known song "Born in the U.S.A." is a patriotic rock 'n' roll anthem because the title is sung as a refrain fifteen times in four-and-a-half minutes. However, the speaker in the song is a character who describes a less-than-positive experience living in this country -- he was "born down in a dead man's town," was sent to Vietnam but when he came home he couldn't get work or VA benefits, his brother died in the war, and after getting into trouble with the law he has "nowhere to run ain't got nowhere to go." Being "born in the U.S.A." has been, for Springsteen's persona, nothing but trouble. The point of his song might seem obvious from the refrain, but if you don't read it or hear all of it in the context he intended, you'll miss the irony.
Be careful because there's a lot at stake. Someday you might assume that the sirens you hear are cops, but it'll be too late when you discover that it's really those dangerous women from Greek mythology.
(Randy Koch teaches English and directs the Writing Center at Texas A&M International University.)