essay on robert frost

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College, marriage, and children

Move to london and publication of a boy’s will, north of boston and fame, move to franconia, teaching career, and pulitzer prizes, later career.

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Robert Frost

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• Table Of Contents

When was Robert Frost born, and when did he die?

Robert Frost was born in 1874, and he died in 1963 at the age of 88.

Who were Robert Frost’s children, and when did they live?

Elliott was born in 1896 and died of cholera in 1900. Lesley lived 1899–1983. Carol was born in 1902 and committed suicide in 1940. Irma lived 1903–67. Marjorie was born in 1905 and died from childbirth in 1934. Elinor was born in 1907 and lived only three days.

What was Robert Frost known for?

Robert Frost was known for his depictions of rural New England life, his grasp of colloquial speech, and his poetry about ordinary people in everyday situations.

What were Robert Frost’s most famous poems?

Robert Frost’s most famous poems included “The Gift Outright,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Birches,” “Mending Wall,” “The Road Not Taken,” and “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”

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Robert Frost (born March 26, 1874, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died January 29, 1963, Boston, Massachusetts) was an American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England , his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations. He was the most highly honored American poet of the 20th century, receiving the Pulitzer Prize for poetry four times. Several of his poems yielded lines that became indelible in the American consciousness , among them “Good fences make good neighbors” (from “ Mending Wall ”), “And miles to go before I sleep” (from “ Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening ”), and “I took the one less traveled by” (from “ The Road Not Taken ”).

Frost’s father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., was a journalist with ambitions of establishing a career in California , and in 1873 he and his wife moved to San Francisco . Her husband’s untimely death from tuberculosis in 1885 prompted Isabelle Moodie Frost to take her two children, Robert and Jeanie, to Lawrence , Massachusetts , where they were taken in by the children’s paternal grandparents. While their mother taught at a variety of schools in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, Robert and Jeanie grew up in Lawrence, and Robert graduated from high school in 1892. A top student in his class, he shared valedictorian honors with Elinor White, with whom he had already fallen in love.

Robert and Elinor shared a deep interest in poetry, but their continued education sent Robert to Dartmouth College and Elinor to St. Lawrence University. Meanwhile, Robert continued to labor on the poetic career he had begun in a small way during high school. He first achieved professional publication in 1894 when The Independent , a weekly literary journal, printed his poem “ My Butterfly: An Elegy .”

Of Frost’s six children, only two survived him: Lesley Frost Ballantine, who became an author of children’s books , and Irma Frost Cone, who was institutionalized in a mental hospital in 1947, where she remained for the rest of her life.

• Elliott Frost: born September 25, 1896—died July 8, 1900 (of cholera )
• Lesley Frost Ballantine: born April 28, 1899—died July 9, 1983
• Carol Frost: born May 22, 1902—died October 9, 1940 (of a self-inflicted gunshot wound)
• Irma Frost Cone: born June 27, 1903—died April 12, 1981
• Marjorie Frost Fraser: born March 29, 1905—died May 2, 1934 (of  puerperal fever  after childbirth )
• Elinor Bettina Frost: born June 18, 1907—died June 21, 1907

Impatient with academic routine, Frost left Dartmouth after less than a year. He and Elinor married in 1895 but found life difficult, and the young poet supported them by teaching school and farming, neither with notable success. During the next dozen years, six children were born, one of whom died in infancy (Elinor Bettina) and another before age four (Elliott), leaving a family of one son (Carol) and three daughters (Lesley, Irma, and Marjorie). Frost resumed his college education at Harvard University in 1897 but left after two years’ study there.

From 1900 to 1909 the family raised poultry on a farm near Derry , New Hampshire , and for a time Frost also taught at the Pinkerton Academy in Derry. Frost became an enthusiastic botanist and acquired his poetic persona of a New England rural sage during the years he and his family spent at Derry. All this while he was writing poems, but publishing outlets showed little interest in them.

By 1911 Frost was fighting against discouragement. Poetry had always been considered a young person’s game, and Frost, who was nearly 40 years old, had not published a single book of poems and had seen just a handful appear in magazines. In 1911 ownership of the Derry farm passed to Frost. A momentous decision was made: to sell the farm and use the proceeds to make a radical new start in London , where publishers were perceived to be more receptive to new talent.

Accordingly, in August 1912 the Frost family sailed across the Atlantic to England . Frost carried with him sheaves of verses he had written but not gotten into print. English publishers in London did indeed prove more receptive to innovative verse, and, through his own vigorous efforts and those of the expatriate American poet Ezra Pound , Frost within a year had published A Boy’s Will (1913). From this first book,such poems as “Storm Fear,” “The Tuft of Flowers,” and “Mowing” became standard anthology pieces.

A Boy’s Will was followed in 1914 by a second collection, North of Boston , that introduced some of the most popular poems in all of Frost’s work, among them “Mending Wall,” “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home Burial,” and “ After Apple-Picking.” In London, Frost’s name was frequently mentioned by those who followed the course of modern literature , and soon American visitors were returning home with news of this unknown poet who was causing a sensation abroad. The Boston poet Amy Lowell traveled to England in 1914, and in the bookstores there she encountered Frost’s work. Taking his books home to America, Lowell then began a campaign to locate an American publisher for them, meanwhile writing her own laudatory review of North of Boston .

Without his being fully aware of it, Frost was on his way to fame. The outbreak of World War I brought the Frosts back to the United States in 1915. By then Amy Lowell’s review had already appeared in The New Republic , and writers and publishers throughout the Northeast were aware that a writer of unusual abilities stood in their midst. The American publishing house of Henry Holt had brought out its edition of North of Boston in 1914. It became a best-seller, and, by the time the Frost family landed in Boston, Holt was adding the American edition of A Boy’s Will . Frost soon found himself besieged by magazines seeking to publish his poems. Never before had an American poet achieved such rapid fame after such a disheartening delay. From this moment his career rose on an ascending curve.

• 1924: New Hampshire: A Poem with Notes and Grace Notes
• 1931: Collected Poems
• 1937: A Further Range
• 1943: A Witness Tree

Frost bought a small farm at Franconia, New Hampshire, in 1915, but his income from both poetry and farming proved inadequate to support his family, and so he lectured and taught part-time at Amherst College and at the University of Michigan from 1916 to 1938. Any remaining doubt about his poetic abilities was dispelled by the collection Mountain Interval (1916), which continued the high level established by his first books. His reputation was further enhanced by New Hampshire (1923), which received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. That prize was also awarded to Frost’s Collected Poems (1930) and to the collections A Further Range (1936) and A Witness Tree (1942). His other poetry volumes include West-Running Brook (1928), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962).

Frost’s wife, Elinor, died of heart failure in 1938 at their winter home in Gainesville , Florida . Frost served as a poet-in-residence at Harvard (1939–43), Dartmouth (1943–49), and Amherst College (1949–63), and in his old age he gathered honors and awards from every quarter. He was the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress (1958–59; the post was later styled poet laureate consultant in poetry), and his recital of his poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of Pres. John F. Kennedy in 1961 was a memorable occasion .

Robert Frost

(1874-1963)

Who Was Robert Frost?

Robert Frost was an American poet and winner of four Pulitzer Prizes. Famous works include “Fire and Ice,” “Mending Wall,” “Birches,” “Out Out,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay” and “Home Burial.” His 1916 poem, "The Road Not Taken," is often read at graduation ceremonies across the United States. As a special guest at President John F. Kennedy ’s inauguration, Frost became a poetic force and the unofficial "poet laureate" of the United States.

Frost spent his first 40 years as an unknown. He exploded on the scene after returning from England at the beginning of World War I . He died of complications from prostate surgery on January 29, 1963.

Early Years

Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. He spent the first 11 years of his life there, until his journalist father, William Prescott Frost Jr., died of tuberculosis.

Following his father's passing, Frost moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, to the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts. They moved in with his grandparents, and Frost attended Lawrence High School.

After high school, Frost attended Dartmouth College for several months, returning home to work a slew of unfulfilling jobs.

Beginning in 1897, Frost attended Harvard University but had to drop out after two years due to health concerns. He returned to Lawrence to join his wife.

In 1900, Frost moved with his wife and children to a farm in New Hampshire — property that Frost's grandfather had purchased for them—and they attempted to make a life on it for the next 12 years. Though it was a fruitful time for Frost's writing, it was a difficult period in his personal life and followed the deaths of two of his young children.

During that time, Frost and Elinor attempted several endeavors, including poultry farming, all of which were fairly unsuccessful.

Despite such challenges, it was during this time that Frost acclimated himself to rural life. In fact, he grew to depict it quite well, and began setting many of his poems in the countryside.

Frost met his future love and wife, Elinor White, when they were both attending Lawrence High School. She was his co-valedictorian when they graduated in 1892.

In 1894, Frost proposed to White, who was attending St. Lawrence University , but she turned him down because she first wanted to finish school. Frost then decided to leave on a trip to Virginia, and when he returned, he proposed again. By then, White had graduated from college, and she accepted. They married on December 19, 1895.

White died in 1938. Diagnosed with cancer in 1937 and having undergone surgery, she also had had a long history of heart trouble, to which she ultimately succumbed.

Frost and White had six children together. Their first child, Elliot, was born in 1896. Daughter Lesley was born in 1899.

Elliot died of cholera in 1900. After his death, Elinor gave birth to four more children: son Carol (1902), who would commit suicide in 1940; Irma (1903), who later developed mental illness; Marjorie (1905), who died in her late 20s after giving birth; and Elinor (1907), who died just weeks after she was born.

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Early Poetry

In 1894, Frost had his first poem, "My Butterfly: an Elegy," published in The Independent , a weekly literary journal based in New York City .

Two poems, "The Tuft of Flowers" and "The Trial by Existence," were published in 1906. He could not find any publishers who were willing to underwrite his other poems.

In 1912, Frost and Elinor decided to sell the farm in New Hampshire and move the family to England, where they hoped there would be more publishers willing to take a chance on new poets.

Within just a few months, Frost, now 38, found a publisher who would print his first book of poems, A Boy’s Will , followed by North of Boston a year later.

It was at this time that Frost met fellow poets Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas, two men who would affect his life in significant ways. Pound and Thomas were the first to review his work in a favorable light, as well as provide significant encouragement. Frost credited Thomas's long walks over the English landscape as the inspiration for one of his most famous poems, "The Road Not Taken."

Apparently, Thomas's indecision and regret regarding what paths to take inspired Frost's work. The time Frost spent in England was one of the most significant periods in his life, but it was short-lived. Shortly after World War I broke out in August 1914, Frost and Elinor were forced to return to America.

Public Recognition for Frost’s Poetry

When Frost arrived back in America, his reputation had preceded him, and he was well-received by the literary world. His new publisher, Henry Holt, who would remain with him for the rest of his life, had purchased all of the copies of North of Boston . In 1916, he published Frost's Mountain Interval , a collection of other works that he created while in England, including a tribute to Thomas.

Journals such as the Atlantic Monthly , who had turned Frost down when he submitted work earlier, now came calling. Frost famously sent the Atlantic the same poems that they had rejected before his stay in England.

In 1915, Frost and Elinor settled down on a farm that they purchased in Franconia, New Hampshire. There, Frost began a long career as a teacher at several colleges, reciting poetry to eager crowds and writing all the while.

He taught at Dartmouth and the University of Michigan at various times, but his most significant association was with Amherst College , where he taught steadily during the period from 1916 until his wife’s death in 1938. The main library is now named in his honor.

For a period of more than 40 years beginning in 1921, Frost also spent almost every summer and fall at Middlebury College , teaching English on its campus in Ripton, Vermont.

In the late 1950s, Frost, along with Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot , championed the release of his old acquaintance Ezra Pound, who was being held in a federal mental hospital for treason due to his involvement with fascists in Italy during World War II . Pound was released in 1958, after the indictments were dropped.

Famous Poems

Some of Frost’s most well-known poems include:

• “The Road Not Taken”
• “Fire and Ice”
• “Mending Wall”
• “Home Burial”
• “The Death of the Hired Man”
• “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”
• “Acquainted with the Night”
• “Nothing Gold Can Stay”

Pulitzer Prizes and Awards

During his lifetime, Frost received more than 40 honorary degrees.

In 1924, Frost was awarded his first of four Pulitzer Prizes, for his book New Hampshire . He would subsequently win Pulitzers for Collected Poems (1931), A Further Range (1937) and A Witness Tree (1943).

In 1960, Congress awarded Frost the Congressional Gold Medal.

President John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration

At the age of 86, Frost was honored when asked to write and recite a poem for President John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration. His sight now failing, he was not able to see the words in the sunlight and substituted the reading of one of his poems, "The Gift Outright," which he had committed to memory.

Soviet Union Tour

In 1962, Frost visited the Soviet Union on a goodwill tour. However, when he accidentally misrepresented a statement made by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev following their meeting, he unwittingly undid much of the good intended by his visit.

On January 29, 1963, Frost died from complications related to prostate surgery. He was survived by two of his daughters, Lesley and Irma. His ashes are interred in a family plot in Bennington, Vermont.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Robert Lee Frost
• Birth Year: 1874
• Birth date: March 26, 1874
• Birth State: California
• Birth City: San Francisco
• Birth Country: United States
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Robert Frost was an American poet who depicted realistic New England life through language and situations familiar to the common man. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for his work and spoke at John F. Kennedy's 1961 inauguration.
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Aries
• Harvard University
• Lawrence High School
• Dartmouth College
• Death Year: 1963
• Death date: January 29, 1963
• Death State: Massachusetts
• Death City: Boston
• Death Country: United States

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Robert Frost Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/robert-frost
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• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: December 1, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
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Poems & Poets

Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken”

Our choices are made clear in hindsight..

BY Katherine Robinson

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, “I’m 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 speaker’s 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 poem’s 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 he’ll ever return. Writing, as he was, for his friend Edward Thomas, Frost was perhaps thinking of one of Thomas’s 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 Frost’s 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. Thomas’s “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 poem’s 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 poem’s 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. Frost’s lines have often been read as a celebration of individualism, an illustration of Emerson’s 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 mind’s ability to mold the past into a particular story. The roads were about the same, and the speaker’s 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; it’s 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 poem’s 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 speaker’s 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 bird’s 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, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d 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 verse’s 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. 

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 poetics, especially in the work of Ted Hughes , and her essays have been published...

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Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, where his father, William Prescott Frost, Jr., and his mother, Isabelle Moodie, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. After the death of his father from tuberculosis when Frost was eleven years old, he moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, who was two years younger, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1892 and, later, at Harvard University, though he never earned a formal degree.

Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel . His first published poem, “My Butterfly,” appeared on November 8, 1894 in the New York newspaper The Independent .

In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, with whom he’d shared valedictorian honors in high school, and who was a major inspiration for his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after they tried and failed at farming in New Hampshire. It was abroad where Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas , Rupert Brooke , and Robert Graves . While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound , who helped to promote and publish his work.

By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy’s Will (Henry Holt and Company, 1913) and North of Boston (Henry Holt and Company, 1914), thereby establishing his reputation. By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poets in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923), A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company, 1936), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt and Company, 1947), and In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)—his fame and honors, including four Pulitzer Prizes, increased. Frost served as a consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress from 1958–59. In 1962, he was presented the Congressional Gold Medal. 

Though Frost’s work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England—and, though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time—Frost is anything but merely a regional poet. The author of searching, and often dark, meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost , the poet Daniel Hoffman describes Frost’s early work as “the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world,” and comments on Frost’s career as the “American Bard”: “He became a national celebrity, our nearly official poet laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain.”

President John F. Kennedy, at whose inauguration Frost delivered a poem, said of the poet, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.” And famously, “He saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the areas of man’s concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of his existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses.”

Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.

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Edward Estlin Cummings is known for his radical experimentation with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax; he abandoned traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression.

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, on October 2, 1879. He attended Harvard University as an undergraduate from 1897 to 1900.

Born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, Harold Hart Crane began writing poetry in his early teenage years.

Philip Larkin

T. S. Eliot

Born in Missouri on September 26, 1888, T. S. Eliot is the author of The Waste Land , which is now considered by many to be the most influential poetic work of the twentieth century.

Born in 1886, Hilda Doolittle was one of the leaders of the Imagist movement. She published numerous poetry collections, including  Sea Garden (Constable and Company, 1916) and  Helen in Egypt (Grove Press, 1961). She died in 1961.

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The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost

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Book description

Robert Frost is one of the most popular American poets and remains widely read. His work is deceptively simple, but reveals its complexities upon close reading. This Introduction provides a comprehensive but intensive look at his remarkable oeuvre. The poetry is discussed in detail in relation to ancient and modern traditions as well as to Frost's particular interests in language and sound, metaphor, science, religion, and politics. Faggen both looks back to the literary traditions that shape Frost's use of form and language, and forward to examine his influence on poets writing today. The recent controversies in Frost criticism and in particular in Frost biography are brought into sharp focus as they have shaped the poet's legacy and legend. The most accessible overview available, this book will be invaluable to students, readers and admirers of Frost.

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Frontmatter pp i-iv

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Contents pp v-vi

Preface pp vii-vii, acknowledgments pp viii-viii, list of abbreviations pp ix-x, 1 - life pp 1-12, 2 - contexts pp 13-24, 3 - works pp 25-161, 4 - reception pp 162-174, notes pp 175-178, guide to further reading pp 179-184, index pp 185-189, the cambridge introductions to literature pp 190-190, full text views.

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Robert Frost

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes.

Frequently honored during his lifetime, Frost is the only poet to receive four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. He became one of America’s rare “public literary figures, almost an artistic institution”. He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1960 for his poetic works. On July 22, 1961, Frost was named poet laureate of Vermont.

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The Road Not Taken Summary & Analysis by Robert Frost

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• Poetic Devices
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• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

Written in 1915 in England, "The Road Not Taken" is one of Robert Frost's—and the world's—most well-known poems. Although commonly interpreted as a celebration of rugged individualism, the poem actually contains multiple different meanings. The speaker in the poem, faced with a choice between two roads, takes the road "less traveled," a decision which he or she supposes "made all the difference." However, Frost creates enough subtle ambiguity in the poem that it's unclear whether the speaker's judgment should be taken at face value, and therefore, whether the poem is about the speaker making a simple but impactful choice, or about how the speaker interprets a choice whose impact is unclear.

• Read the full text of “The Road Not Taken”

The Full Text of “The Road Not Taken”

1 Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

2 And sorry I could not travel both

3 And be one traveler, long I stood

4 And looked down one as far as I could

5 To where it bent in the undergrowth;

6 Then took the other, as just as fair,

7 And having perhaps the better claim,

8 Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

9 Though as for that the passing there

10 Had worn them really about the same,

11 And both that morning equally lay

12 In leaves no step had trodden black.

13 Oh, I kept the first for another day!

14 Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

15 I doubted if I should ever come back.

16 I shall be telling this with a sigh

17 Somewhere ages and ages hence:

18 Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

19 I took the one less traveled by,

20 And that has made all the difference.

“The Road Not Taken” Summary

“the road not taken” themes.

Choices and Uncertainty

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Individualism and Nonconformity

Making Meaning

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “the road not taken”.

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.

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.

Lines 16-17

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Lines 18-20

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

“The Road Not Taken” Symbols

Diverging Roads

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The Road Less Traveled

“the road not taken” poetic devices & figurative language, extended metaphor.

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“The Road Not Taken” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Yellow wood
• Undergrowth
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Road Not Taken”

Rhyme scheme, “the road not taken” speaker, “the road not taken” setting, literary and historical context of “the road not taken”, more “the road not taken” resources, external resources.

"The Most Misread Poem in America" — An insightful article in the Paris Review, which goes into depth about some of the different ways of reading (or misreading) "The Road Not Taken."

Robert Frost reads "The Road Not Taken" — Listen to Robert Frost read the poem.

Book Review: "The Road Not Taken," by David Orr — Those looking for an even more in-depth treatment of the poem might be interested in David Orr's book, "The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong."

LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Frost

Acquainted with the Night

After Apple-Picking

A Roadside Stand

Desert Places

Dust of Snow

Fire and Ice

Home Burial

Mending Wall

My November Guest

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

The Death of the Hired Man

The Oven Bird

The Sound of the Trees

The Tuft of Flowers

The Wood-Pile

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On Grief and Reason

I should tell you that what follows is a spinoff of a seminar given four years ago at the Collège International de Philosophie, in Paris. Hence a certain breeziness to the pace; hence, too, the paucity of biographical material—irrelevant, in my view, to the analysis of a work of art in general, and particularly where a foreign audience is concerned. In any case, the pronoun “you” in these pages stands for those ignorant of or poorly acquainted with the lyrical and narrative strengths of the poetry of Robert Frost. But, first, some basics.

Robert Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963, at the age of eighty-eight. One marriage, six children; fairly strapped when young; farming, and, later, teaching jobs in various schools. Not much travelling until late in his life; he mostly resided on the East Coast, in New England. If biography accounts for poetry, this one should have resulted in none. Yet he published nine books of poems; the second one, “North of Boston,” which came out when he was forty, made him famous. That was in 1914.

After that, his sailing was a bit smoother. But literary fame is not exactly popularity. As it happens, it took the Second World War to bring Frost’s work to the general public’s notice. In 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime distributed fifty thousand copies of Frost’s “Come In” to United States troops stationed overseas, as a morale-builder. By 1955, his “Selected Poems” was in its fourth edition, and one could speak of his poetry’s having acquired national standing.

It did. In the course of nearly five decades following the publication of “North of Boston,” Frost reaped every possible reward and honor an American poet can get; shortly before Frost’s death, John Kennedy invited him to read a poem at the Inauguration ceremony. Along with recognition naturally came a great deal of envy and resentment, a substantial contribution to which emerged from the pen of Frost’s own biographer. And yet both the adulation and resentment had one thing in common: a nearly total misconception of what Frost was all about.

He is generally regarded as the poet of the countryside, of rural settings—as a folksy, crusty, wisecracking old gentleman farmer, generally of positive disposition. In short, as American as apple pie. To be fair, he greatly enhanced this notion by projecting precisely this image of himself in numerous public appearances and interviews throughout his career. I suppose it wasn’t that difficult for him to do, for he had those qualities in him as well. He was indeed a quintessential American poet; it is up to us, however, to find out what that quintessence is made of, and what the term “American” means as applied to poetry and, perhaps, in general.

In 1959, at a banquet thrown in New York on the occasion of Robert Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday, the most prominent literary critic at that time, Lionel Trilling, rose and declared that Robert Frost was “a terrifying poet.” That, of course, caused a certain stir, but the epithet was well chosen.

Now, I want you to make the distinction here between terrifying and tragic. Tragedy, as you know, is always a fait accompli, whereas terror always has to do with anticipation, with man’s recognition of his own negative potential—with his sense of what he is capable of. And it is the latter that was Frost’s forte, not the former. In other words, his posture is radically different from the Continental tradition of the poet as tragic hero. And that difference alone makes him—for want of a better term—American.

On the surface, he looks very positively predisposed toward his surroundings—particularly toward nature. His fluency, his “being versed in country things” alone can produce this impression. However, there is a difference between the way a European perceives nature and the way an American does. Addressing this difference, W. H. Auden, in his short essay on Frost, suggests something to the effect that when a European conceives of confronting nature, he walks out of his cottage or a little inn, filled with either friends or family, and goes for an evening stroll. If he encounters a tree, it’s a tree made familiar by history, to which it’s been a witness. This or that king sat underneath it, laying down this or that law—something of that sort. A tree stands there rustling, as it were, with allusions. Pleased and somewhat pensive, our man, refreshed but unchanged by that encounter, returns to his inn or cottage, finds his friends or family absolutely intact, and proceeds to have a good, merry time. Whereas when an American walks out of his house and encounters a tree it is a meeting of equals. Man and tree face each other in their respective primal power, free of references: neither has a past, and as to whose future is greater, it is a toss-up. Basically, it’s epidermis meeting bark. Our man returns to his cabin in a state of bewilderment, to say the least, if not in actual shock or terror.

Now, this is obviously a romantic caricature, but it accentuates the features, and that’s what I am after here. In any case, the second point could be safely billed as the gist of Robert Frost’s nature poetry. Nature for this poet is neither friend nor foe, nor is it the backdrop for human drama; it is this poet’s terrifying self-portrait. And now I am going to start with one of his poems, which appears in the 1942 volume “A Witness Tree.” I am about to put forth my views and opinions about his lines without any concern for academic objectivity, and some of these views will be pretty dark. All I can say in my defense is (a) that I do like this poet enormously and I am going to try to sell him to you as he is, and (b) that some of that darkness is not entirely mine: it is his lines’ sediment that has darkened my mind; in other words, I got it from him.

Let’s look at “Come In.” A short poem in short metre—actually, a combination of trimeter with dimeter, anapest with iamb. The stuff of ballads, which by and large are all about gore and comeuppance. So, up to a certain point, is this poem. The metre hints as much. What are we dealing with here? A walk in the woods? A stroll through nature? Something that poets usually do? (And if yes, by the way, then why?) “Come In” is one of many poems written by Frost about such strolls. Think of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Acquainted with the Night,” “Desert Places,” “Away!,” and so forth. Or else think of Thomas Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush,” with which this poem has a distinct affinity. Hardy was also very fond of lonely strolls, except most of his had a tendency to wind up in a graveyard—since England was settled long ago, and more thickly, I guess.

To begin with, we again have a thrush. And a bird, as you know, is very often a bard, since, technically speaking, both sing. So as we proceed we should bear in mind that our poet may be delegating certain aspects of his psyche to the bird. Actually, I firmly believe that these two birds are related. The difference is only that it takes Hardy sixteen lines to introduce his bird in a poem, whereas Frost gets down to business in the second line. On the whole, this is indicative of the difference between the Americans and the British—I mean in poetry. Because of a greater cultural heritage, a greater set of references, it usually takes much longer for a Briton to set a poem in motion. The sense of echo is stronger in his ear, and thus he flexes his muscle and demonstrates his facility before he gets down to his subject. Normally, that sort of routine results in a poem’s being as big on exposition as on the actual message: in long-windedness, if you will—though, depending on who is doing the job, this is not necessarily a shortcoming.

Now, let’s do it line by line. “As I came to the edge of the woods” is a fairly simple, informative job, stating the subject and setting the metre. An innocent line, on the surface, wouldn’t you say? Well, it is, save for “the woods.” “The woods” makes one suspicious, and, with that, “the edge” does, too. Poetry is a dame with a huge pedigree, and every word comes practically barnacled with allusions and associations. Since the fourteenth century, the woods have given off a very strong smell of* selva oscura*, and you may recall what that selva led the author of the Divine Comedy into. In any case, when a twentieth-century poet starts a poem with finding himself at the edge of the woods there is a reasonable element of danger—or, at least, a faint suggestion of it. The edge, in its very self, is sufficiently sharp.

Maybe not; maybe our suspicions are unfounded, maybe we are just paranoid and are reading too much into this line. Let’s go to the next line, and we shall see:

As I came to the edge of the woods, Thrush music—hark!

Looks like we’ve goofed. What could be more innocuous than this antiquated, Victorian-sounding, fairy-tale-like “hark”? A bird is singing—listen! “Hark” truly belongs in a Hardy poem, or in a ballad; better yet, in a jingle. It suggests a level of diction at which nothing untoward could be conveyed. The poem promises to proceed in a comforting, melodious way. That’s what you’re thinking, anyway, after hearing “hark”: that you’re going to have some sort of description of the music made by the thrush—that you are getting into familiar territory.

But that was a setup, as the following two lines show. It was but an exposition, crammed by Frost into two lines. Abruptly, in a fairly indecorous, matter-of-fact, non-melodious, and non-Victorian way, the diction and the register shift:

Now if it was dusk outside, Inside it was dark.

It’s “now” that does this job of leaving very little room for any fancy. What’s more, you realize that the “hark” rhymes with “dark.” And that that “dark” is the condition of “inside,” which could allude not only to the woods, since the comma sets that “inside” into sharp opposition to the third line’s “outside,” and since the opposition is given you in the fourth line, which makes it a more drastic statement. Not to mention that this opposition is but the matter of substitution of just two letters: of putting “ar” instead of “us” between “d” and “k.” The vowel sound remains essentially the same. What we’ve got here is the difference in just one consonant.

There is a slight choking air in the fourth line. That has to do with its distribution of stresses, different from the first dimeter. The stanza contracts, as it were, toward its end, and the caesura after “inside” only underscores that “inside” ’s isolation. Now, while I am offering you this deliberately slanted reading of this poem, I’d like to urge you to pay very close attention to its every letter, every caesura, if only because it deals with a bird, and a bird’s trills are a matter of pauses and, if you will, characters. Being predominantly monosyllabic, English is highly suitable for this parroting job, and the shorter the metre, the greater the pressure upon every letter, every caesura, every comma. At any rate, that “dark” literally renders the “woods” as la selva oscura .

With the memory of what that dark wood was entry to, let’s approach the next stanza:

Too dark in the woods for a bird By sleight of wing To better its perch for the night, Though it still could sing.

What do you think is happening here? A British or a Continental—or, for that matter, a properly American—innocent would still reply that it is about a bird singing in the evening, and that it is a nice tune. Interestingly, he would be right, and it is on this sort of rightness that Frost’s reputation rests. In fact, though, this stanza, in particular, is extremely dark. One could argue that the poem considers something rather unpleasant, quite possibly a suicide. Or, if not suicide—well, death. And, if not necessarily death, then—at least, in this stanza—the notion of the afterlife.

In “Too dark in the woods for a bird,” a bird, alias bard, scrutinizes “the woods” and finds them too dark. “Too” here echoes—no! harks back to—Dante’s opening lines in the Divine Comedy: our bird/bard’s assessment of that selva differs from the great Italian’s. To put it plainly, the afterlife is darker for Frost than it is for Dante. The question is why, and the answer is either because he disbelieves in the whole thing or because his notion of himself makes him, in his mind, slated for damnation. Nothing in his power can improve his eventual standing, and I’d venture that “sleight of wing” could be regarded as a reference to last rites. Above all, this poem is about being old and pondering what is next. “To better its perch for the night” has to do with the possibility of being assigned elsewhere, not just to Hell—the night here being that of eternity. The only thing the bird/bard has to show for himself is that it/he “still could sing.”

“The woods” are “too dark” for a bird because a bird is too far gone at being a bird. No motion of its soul, alias “sleight of wing,” can improve its eventual fate in these “woods.” Whose woods these are I think we know: one of their branches is where a bird is to end up anyway, and a “perch” gives a sense of these woods’ being well structured: it is an enclosure—a sort of chicken coop, if you will. Thus, our bird is doomed; no last-minute conversion (“sleight” is a conjuring term) is feasible, if only because a bard is too old for any quick motion of the hand. Yet, old though he is, he still can sing.

And in the third stanza you have that bird singing: you have the song itself, the last one. It is a tremendously expansive gesture. Look at how every word here postpones the next one. “The last”—caesura—“of the light”—caesura—“of the sun”—line break, which is a big caesura—“That had died”—caesura—“in the west.” Our bird/bard traces the last of the light to its vanished source. You almost hear in this line the good old “Shenandoah,” the song of going West. Delay and postponement are palpable here. “The last” is not finite, and “of the light” is not finite, and “of the sun” is not. What’s more, “that had died” itself is not finite, though it should have been. Even “in the west” isn’t. What we’ve got here is the song of lingering: of light, of life. You almost see the finger pointing out the source and then, in the broad circular motion of the last two lines, returning to the speaker in “Still lived”—caesura—“for one song more”—line break—“In a thrush’s breast.” Between “The last” and “breast” our poet covers an extraordinary distance: the width of the continent, if you will. After all, he describes the light, which is still upon him, the opposite of the darkness of the woods. The breast is, after all, the source of any song, and you almost see here not so much a thrush as a robin; anyhow, a bird singing at sunset: it lingers on the bird’s breast.

And here, in the opening lines of the fourth stanza, is where the bird and the bard part ways. “Far in the pillared dark / Thrush music went.” The key word here is “pillared,” of course: it suggests a cathedral interior—a church, in any case. In other words, our thrush flies into the woods, and you hear his music from within, “almost like a call to come in / To the dark and lament.” If you want, you may replace “lament” with “repent”: the effect will be practically the same. What’s being described here is one of the choices before our old bard this evening: the choice he does not make. The thrush has chosen that “sleight of wing” after all. It is bettering its perch for the night; it accepts its fate, for lament is acceptance. You could plunge yourself here into a maze of ecclesiastical distinctions—Frost’s essential Protestantism, etc. I’d advise against it, since a stoic posture befits believers and agnostics alike; in this line of work, it is practically inescapable. On the whole, references (religious ones especially) are not to be shrunk to inferences.

“But no, I was out for stars” is Frost’s usual deceptive maneuver, projecting his positive sensibility: lines like that are what earned him his reputation. If he was indeed “out for stars,” why didn’t he mention that before? Why did he write the whole poem about something else? But this line is here not solely to deceive you. It is here to deceive—or, rather, to quell—himself. This whole stanza is. Unless we read this line as the poet’s general statement about his presence in this world—in the romantic key, that is, as a line about his general metaphysical appetite, not to be quenched by this little one-night agony.

I would not come in. I meant not even if asked, And I hadn’t been.

There is too much jocular vehemence in these lines for us to take them at face value, although we should not omit this option, either. The man is shielding himself from his own insights, and he gets grammatically as well as syllabically assertive and less idiomatic—especially in the second line, “I would not come in,” which could be easily truncated into “I won’t come in.” “I meant not even if asked” comes off with a menacing resoluteness, which could amount to a statement of his agnosticism were it not for the last line’s all too clever qualifier: “And I hadn’t been.” This is indeed a sleight of hand.

Or else you can treat this stanza and, with it, the whole poem as Frost’s humble footnote or postscript to Dante’s Commedia, which ends with “stars”—as his acknowledgment of possessing either a lesser belief or a lesser gift. The poet here refuses an invitation into darkness; moreover, he questions the very call: “ Almost like a call to come in . . .” One shouldn’t make heavy weather of Frost’s affinity with Dante, but here and there it’s palpable, especially in the poems dealing with dark nights of the soul—for instance, in “Acquainted with the Night.” Unlike a number of his illustrious contemporaries, Frost never wears his learning on his sleeve—mainly because it is in his bloodstream. So “I meant not even if asked” could be read not only as his refusal to make a meal of his dreadful apprehension but also as a reference to his stylistic choice in ruling out a major form. Be that as it may, one thing is clear: without Dante’s Commedia, this poem wouldn’t have existed.

Still, should you choose to read “Come In” as a nature poem, you are perfectly welcome to it. I suggest, though, that you take a longer look at the title. The twenty lines of the poem constitute, as it were, the title’s translation. And in this translation, I am afraid, the expression “come in” means “die.”

While in “Come In” we have Frost at his lyrical best, in “Home Burial” we have him at his narrative best. Actually, “Home Burial” is not a narrative; it is an eclogue. Or, more exactly, it is a pastoral—except that it is a very dark one. Insofar as it tells a story, it is, of course, a narrative; the means of that story’s transportation, though, is dialogue, and it is the means of transportation that defines a genre. Invented by Theocritus in his idylls, refined by Virgil in the poems called Eclogues or Bucolics, the pastoral is essentially an exchange between two or more characters in a rural setting, returning often to that perennial subject, love. Since the English and French word “pastoral” is overburdened with happy connotations, and since Frost is closer to Virgil than to Theocritus, and not only chronologically, let’s follow Virgil and call this poem an eclogue. The rural setting is here, and so are the two characters: a farmer and his wife, who may qualify as a shepherd and a shepherdess, except that it is two thousand years later. So is their subject: love, two thousand years later.

To make a long story short, Frost is a very Virgilian poet. By that, I mean the Virgil of the Bucolics and the Georgics, not the Virgil of the Aeneid. To begin with, the young Frost did a considerable amount of farming—as well as a lot of writing. The posture of gentleman farmer wasn’t all posture. As a matter of fact, until the end of his days he kept buying farms. By the time he died, he had owned, if I am not mistaken, four farms in Vermont and New Hampshire. He knew something about living off the land—not less, in any case, than Virgil, who must have been a disastrous farmer, to judge by the agricultural advice he dispenses in the Georgics.

With few exceptions, American poetry is essentially Virgilian, which is to say contemplative. That is, if you take four Roman poets of the Augustan period, Propertius, Ovid, Virgil, and Horace, as the standard representatives of the four known humors (Propertius’s choleric intensity, Ovid’s sanguine couplings, Virgil’s phlegmatic musings, Horace’s melancholic equipoise), then American poetry—indeed, poetry in English in general—strikes you as being by and large of Virgilian or Horatian denomination. (Consider the bulk of Wallace Stevens’ soliloquies, or the late, American Auden.) Yet Frost’s affinity with Virgil is not so much temperamental as technical. Apart from frequent recourse to disguise (or mask) and the opportunity for distancing oneself that an invented character offers to the poet, Frost and Virgil have in common a tendency to hide the real subject matter of their dialogues under the monotonous, opaque sheen of their respective pentameters and hexameters. A poet of extraordinary probing and anxiety, the Virgil of the Eclogues and the Georgics is commonly taken for a bard of love and country pleasures, just like the author of “North of Boston.”

To this it should be added that Virgil in Frost comes to you obscured by Wordsworth and Browning. “Filtered” is perhaps a better word, and Browning’s dramatic monologue is quite a filter, engulfing the dramatic situation in solid Victorian ambivalence and uncertainty. Frost’s dark pastorals are dramatic also, not only in the sense of the intensity of the characters’ interplay but above all in the sense that they are indeed theatrical. It is a kind of theatre in which the author plays all the roles, including those of stage designer, director, ballet master, etc. It’s he who turns the lights off, and sometimes he is the audience also.

That stands to reason. For Theocritus’s idylls, in their own right, are but a compression of Greek drama. In “Home Burial” we have an arena reduced to a staircase, with its Hitchcockian banister. The opening line tells you as much about the actors’ positions as about their roles: those of the hunter and his prey. Or, as you’ll see later, of Pygmalion and Galatea, except that in this case the sculptor turns his living model into stone. In the final analysis, “Home Burial” is a love poem, and if only on these grounds it qualifies as a pastoral.

But let’s examine this line and a half:

He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him.

Frost could have stopped right here. It is already a poem, it is already a drama. Imagine this line and a half sitting on the page all by itself, in minimalist fashion. It’s an extremely loaded scene—or, better yet, a frame. You’ve got an enclosure, the house, with two individuals at cross—no, diverse—purposes. He’s at the bottom of the stairs; she’s at the top. He’s looking up at her; she, for all we know thus far, doesn’t register his presence at all. Also, you’ve got to remember that it’s in black and white. The staircase dividing them suggests a hierarchy of significances. It is a pedestal with her atop (at least, in his eyes) and him at the bottom (in our eyes and, eventually, in hers). The angle is sharp. Place yourself here in either position—better in his—and you’ll see what I mean. Imagine yourself observing, watching somebody, or imagine yourself being watched. Imagine yourself interpreting someone’s movements—or immobility—unbeknownst to that person. That’s what turns you into a hunter, or into Pygmalion.

Let me press this Pygmalion business a bit further. Scrutiny and interpretation are the gist of any intense human interplay, and of love in particular. They are also the most powerful source of literature: of fiction (which is by and large about betrayal) and, above all, of lyric poetry, where one is trying to figure out the beloved and what makes her/him tick. And this figuring out brings us back to the Pygmalion business quite literally, since the more you chisel out and the more you penetrate the character, the more you put your model on a pedestal. An enclosure—be it a house, a studio, a page—intensifies this pedestal aspect enormously. And, depending on your industry and on the model’s ability to coöperate, this process results either in a masterpiece or in a disaster. In “Home Burial” it results in both. For every Galatea is ultimately a Pygmalion’s self-projection. On the other hand, art doesn’t imitate life but infects it.

So let’s watch the deportment of the model:

         She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a doubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again.

On the literal level, on the level of straight narrative, we have the heroine beginning to descend the steps with her head turned to us in profile, her glance lingering on some frightful sight. She hesitates and interrupts her descent, her eyes still trained, presumably, on the same sight: neither on the steps nor on the man at the bottom. But you are aware of yet another level present here, aren’t you? Let’s leave that level as yet unnamed. Each piece of information in this narrative comes to you in an isolated manner, within a pentameter line. The isolation job is done by white margins framing, as it were, the whole scene, like the silence of the house; and the lines themselves are the staircase. Basically, what you get here is a succession of frames. “She was starting down” is one frame. “Looking back over her shoulder at some fear” is another; in fact, it is a closeup, a profile—you see her facial expression. “She took a doubtful step and then undid it” is a third: again a closeup—the feet. “To raise herself and look again” is a fourth—full figure.

But this is a ballet, too. There is a minimum of two pas de deux here, conveyed to you with a wonderful euphonic, almost alliterative precision. I mean the “d”s in this line, in “doubtful” and in “undid it,” although the “t”s matter also. “Undid it” is particularly good, because you sense the spring in that step. And that profile in its opposition to the movement of the body—the very formula of a dramatic heroine—is straight out of a ballet as well.

But the real faux pas de deux starts with “He spoke / Advancing toward her.” For the next twenty-five lines, a conversation occurs on the stairs. The man climbs them as he speaks, negotiating mechanically and verbally what separates them. “Advancing” bespeaks self-consciousness and apprehensiveness. The tension grows with the growing proximity. However, the mechanical and, by implication, physical proximity is more easily attained than the verbal—i.e., the mental—and that’s what the poem is all about. “ ‘What is it you see / From up there always?—for I want to know’ ” is very much a Pygmalion question, addressed to the model on the pedestal: atop the staircase. His fascination is not with what he sees but with what he imagines it conceals—what he has placed there. He invests her with mystery and then rushes to uncloak it: this rapacity is always Pygmalion’s double bind. It is as though the sculptor found himself puzzled by the facial expression of his model: she “sees” what he does not “see.” So he has to climb to the pedestal himself, to put himself in her position. In the position of “up there always”—of topographical (vis-à-vis the house) and psychological advantage, where he put her himself. It is the latter, the psychological advantage of the creation, that disturbs the creator, as the emphatic “ ‘for I want to know’ ” shows.

The model refuses to coöperate. In the next frame (“She turned and sank upon her skirts at that”), followed by the closeup of “And her face changed from terrified to dull,” you get that lack of coöperation plain. Yet the lack of coöperation here is coöperation. For we have to bear in mind that the woman’s psychological advantage is in the man’s self-projection. He ascribes it to her. So by turning him down she only enhances his fantasy. In this sense, by refusing to coöperate she plays along. That’s basically her whole game here. The more he climbs, the greater is that advantage; he pushes her into it, as it were, with every step.

Still, he is climbing: in “he said to gain time” he climbs, and also in

         “What is it you see?” Mounting until she cowered under him. “I will find out now—you must tell me, dear.”

The most important word here is the verb “see,” which we encounter for the second time. In the next nine lines, it will be used four more times. We’ll get to that in a minute. But first let’s deal with this “mounting” line and the next. It’s a masterly job here. With “mounting,” the poet kills two birds at once, for “mounting” describes both the climb and the climber. And the climber looms even larger, because the woman “cowers”—i.e., shrinks under him. Remember that she looks “at some fear.” “Mounting” versus “cowered” gives you the contrast, then, between their respective frames, with the implicit danger contained in his largeness. In any case, her alternative to fear is not comfort. And the resoluteness of “ ‘I will find out now’ ” echoes the superior physical mass, not alleviated by the cajoling “dear” that follows a remark—“ ‘you must tell me’ ”—that is both imperative and conscious of this contrast.

She, in her place, refused him any help, With the least stiffening of her neck and silence. She let him look, sure that he wouldn’t see, Blind creature; and awhile he didn’t see. But at last he murmured, “Oh,” and again, “Oh.”

“What is it—what?” she said.

         “Just that I see.”

“You don’t,” she challenged. “Tell me what it is.”

“The wonder is I didn’t see at once.”

And now we come to this verb “see.” Within fifteen lines it’s been used six times. Every experienced poet knows how risky it is to use the same word several times in a short space. The risk is that of tautology. So what is it that Frost is after here? I think he is after precisely that: tautology. More accurately, nonsemantic utterance. Which you get, for instance, in “ ‘Oh,’ and again, ‘Oh.’ ” Frost had a theory about what he called “sentence-sounds.” It had to do with his observation that the sound, the tonality, of human locution is as semantic as actual words. For instance, you overhear two people conversing behind a closed door, in a room. You don’t hear the words, yet you know the general drift of their dialogue; in fact, you may pretty accurately figure out its substance. In other words, the tune matters more than the lyrics, which are, so to speak, replaceable or redundant. Anyway, the repetition of this or that word liberates the tune, makes it more audible. By the same token, such repetition liberates the mind—rids you of the notion presented by the word. (This is the old Zen technique, of course, but, come to think of it, finding it in an American poem makes you wonder whether philosophical principles don’t spring from texts rather than the other way around.)

The six “see”s here do precisely that. They exclaim rather than explain. It could be “see,” it could be “Oh,” it could be “yes,” it could be any monosyllabic word. The idea is to explode the verb from within, for the content of the actual observation defeats the process of observation, its means, and the very observer. The effect that Frost tries to create is the inadequacy of response when you automatically repeat the first word that comes to your tongue. “Seeing” here is simply reeling from the unnameable. The least seeing our hero does is in “ ‘Just that I see,’ ” for by this time the verb, having already been used four times, is robbed of its “observing” and “understanding” meaning (not to mention the fact—draining the word even further of content—that we readers are ourselves still in the dark, don’t know what there is to see out that window). By now, it is just sound, denoting an animal response rather than a rational one.

This sort of explosion of bona-fide words into pure, nonsemantic sounds will occur several times in the course of this poem. Another happens very soon, ten lines later. Characteristically, these explosions occur whenever the players find themselves in close physical proximity. They are the verbal—or, better yet, the audial—equivalents of a hiatus. Frost directs them with tremendous consistency, suggesting his characters’ profound (at least, prior to this scene) incompatibility. “Home Burial” is, in fact, the study of that, and on the literal level the tragedy it describes is the characters’ comeuppance for violating each other’s territorial and mental imperatives by having a child. Now that the child is lost, the imperatives play themselves out with vehemence: they claim their own.

By standing next to the woman, the man acquires her vantage point. Because he is larger than she, and also because this is his house (as line 23 shows), where he has lived, presumably, most of his life, he must, one imagines, bend somewhat to put his eyes on her line of vision. Now they are next to each other, in an almost intimate proximity, on the threshold of their bedroom, atop the stairs. The bedroom has a window; a window has a view. And here Frost produces the most stunning simile of this poem, and perhaps of his entire career:

“The wonder is I didn’t see at once. I never noticed it from here before. I must be wonted to it—that’s the reason. The little graveyard where my people are! So small the window frames the whole of it. Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it? There are three stones of slate and one of marble, Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight On the sidehill. We haven’t to mind those . But I understand: it is not the stones, But the child’s mound—”

“ ‘The little graveyard where my people are!’ ” generates an air of endearment, and it’s with this air that “ ‘So small the window frames the whole of it’ ” starts, only to tumble itself into “ ‘Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it?’ ” The key word here is “frames,” because it doubles as the window’s actual frame and as a picture on a bedroom wall. The window hangs, as it were, on the bedroom wall like a picture, and that picture depicts a graveyard. “Depicting,” though, means reducing to the size of a picture. Imagine having that in your bedroom. In the next line, though, the graveyard is restored to its actual size and, for that reason, equated with the bedroom. This equation is as much psychological as it is spatial. Inadvertently, the man blurts out the summary of the marriage (foreshadowed in the grim pun of the title). And, equally inadvertently, the “is it?” invites the woman to agree with this summary, almost implying her complicity.

As if that were not enough, the next two lines, with their stones of slate and marble, proceed to reinforce the simile, equating the graveyard with the made-up bed, with its pentametrically arranged pillows and cushions—populated by a family of small, inanimate children: “Broad-shouldered little slabs.” This is Pygmalion unbound, on a rampage. What we have here is the man’s intrusion into the woman’s mind, a violation of her mental imperative—if you will, an ossification of it. And then this ossifying hand—petrifying, actually—stretches toward what’s still raw, palpably as well as in her mind:

“But I understand: it is not the stones, But the child’s mound—”

It’s not that the contrast between the stones and the mound is too stark, though it is; it is his ability—or, rather, his attempt—to articulate it that she finds unbearable. For, should he succeed, should he find the words to articulate her mental anguish, the mound will join the stones in the “picture,” will become a slab itself, will become a pillow of their bed. Moreover, this will amount to the total penetration of her inner sanctum: that of her mind. And he is getting there:

         “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t,” she cried.

She withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arm That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs; And turned on him with such a daunting look, He said twice over before he knew himself: “Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”

The poem is gathering its dark force. Four “Don’t”s are that nonsemantic explosion, resulting in hiatus. We are so much in the story line now—up to the eyebrows—that we may forget that this is still a ballet, still a succession of frames, still an artifice, stage-managed by the poet. In fact, we are about to take sides with our characters, aren’t we? Well, I suggest we pull ourselves out of this by our eyebrows and think for a moment about what it all tells us about our poet. Imagine, for instance, that the story line has been drawn from experience—from, say, the loss of a firstborn. What does all that you’ve read thus far tell you about the author, about his sensibility? How much he is absorbed by the story and—what’s more crucial—to what degree he is free from it?

Were this a seminar, I’d wait for your answers. Since it is not, I’ve got to answer this question myself. And the answer is: He is very free. Dangerously so. The very ability to utilize—to play with—this sort of material suggests an extremely wide margin of detachment. The ability to turn this material into a blank-verse, pentameter monotone adds another degree to that detachment. To observe a relation between a family graveyard and a bedroom’s four-poster—still another. Added up, they amount to a considerable degree of detachment. A degree that dooms human interplay, that makes communication impossible, for communication requires an equal. This is very much the predicament of Pygmalion vis-à-vis his model. So it’s not that the story the poem tells is autobiographical but that the poem is the author’s self-portrait. That is why one abhors literary biography—because it is reductive. That is why I am resisting issuing you with actual data on Frost.

Where does he go, you may ask, with all that detachment? The answer is: utter autonomy. It is from there that he observes similarities among unlike things, it is from there that he imitates the vernacular. Would you like to meet Mr. Frost? Then read his poems, nothing else; otherwise, you are in for criticism from below. Would you like to be him? Would you like to become Robert Frost? Perhaps one should be advised against such aspirations. For a sensibility like this, there is very little hope of real human conjugality; and, actually, there is very little romantic dirt on him—of the sort normally indicative of such hope.

This is not necessarily a digression, but let’s get back to the lines. Remember the hiatus, and what causes it, and remember that this is an artifice. Actually, the author himself reminds you of it with

She withdrew, shrinking from beneath his arm That rested on the banister, and slid downstairs.

It is still a ballet, you see, and the stage direction is incorporated into the text. The most telling detail here is the banister. Why does the author put it here? First, to reintroduce the staircase, which we might by now have forgotten about, stunned by the business of ruining the bedroom. But, secondly, the banister prefigures her sliding downstairs, since every child uses banisters for sliding down. “And turned on him with such a daunting look” is another stage direction.

He said twice over before he knew himself: “Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”

Now, this is a remarkably good line. It has a distinctly vernacular, almost proverbial air. And the author is definitely aware of how good it is. So, both trying to underscore its effectiveness and to obscure his awareness of it, he emphasizes the unwittingness of this utterance: “He said twice over before he knew himself.” On the literal, narrative level, we have the man stunned by the woman’s gaze, the daunting look, and groping for words. Frost was awfully good with those formulaic, quasi-proverbial one-liners. “For to be social is to be forgiving” (in “The Star-Splitter”), or “The best way out is always through” (“A Servant to Servants”), for example. And a few lines later you are going to get yet another one. They are mostly pentametric; iambic pentameter is very congenial to that sort of job.

This whole section of the poem, from “ ‘Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t’ ” on, obviously has some sexual connotations, of her turning the man down. That’s what the story of Pygmalion and his model is all about. On the literal level, “Home Burial” evolves along similar “hard to get” lines. However, I don’t think that Frost, for all his autonomy, was conscious of that. (After all, “North of Boston” shows no acquaintance with Freudian terminology.) And, if he was not, this sort of approach on our part is invalid. Nevertheless, we should bear some of it in mind as we are embarking on the bulk of this poem:

“Not you!—Oh, where’s my hat? Oh, I don’t need it! I must get out of here. I must get air.— I don’t know rightly whether any man can.” “Amy! Don’t go to someone else this time. Listen to me. I won’t come down the stairs.” He sat and fixed his chin between his fists. “There’s something I should like to ask you, dear.” “You don’t know how to ask it.”

         “Help me, then.” Her fingers moved the latch for all reply.

What we’ve got here is the desire to escape: not so much the man as the enclosure of the place, not to mention the subject of their exchange. Yet the resolution is incomplete, as the fidgeting with the hat shows, since the execution of this desire will be counterproductive for the model as far as being the subject of explication goes. May I go so far as to suggest that that would mean a loss of advantage, not to mention that it would be the end of the poem? In fact, it does end with precisely that, with her exit. The literal level will get into conflict, or fusion, with the metaphorical. Hence “ ‘I don’t know rightly whether any man can,’ ” which fuses both these levels, forcing the poem to proceed; you don’t know any longer who is the horse here, who is the cart. I doubt whether the poet himself knew that at this point. The fusion’s result is the release of a certain force, which subordinates his pen, and the best it can do is keep both strands—literal and metaphorical—in check.

We learn the heroine’s name, and that this sort of discourse had its precedents, with nearly identical results. Given the fact that we know the way the poem ends, we may judge—well, we may imagine—the character of those occasions. The scene in “Home Burial” is but a repetition. By this token, the poem doesn’t so much inform us about their life as replace it. We also learn, from “ ‘Don’t go to someone else this time,’ ” about a mixture of jealousy and sense of shame felt by at least one of them. And we learn, from “ ‘I won’t come down the stairs’ ” and from “He sat and fixed his chin between his fists,” about the fear of violence present in their physical proximity. The latter line is a wonderful embodiment of stasis, very much in the fashion of Rodin’s “Penseur,” albeit with two fists, which is a very telling self-referential detail, since the forceful application of fist to chin is what results in a knockout.

The main thing here, though, is the reintroduction of the stairs. Not only the literal stairs but the steps in “he sat,” too. From now on, the entire dialogue occurs on the stairs, though they have become the scene of an impasse rather than a passage. No physical steps are taken. Instead, we have their verbal, or oral, substitute. The ballet ends, yielding to the verbal advance and retreat, which is heralded by “ ‘There’s something I should like to ask you, dear.’ ” Note again the air of cajoling, colored this time with the recognition of its futility in “dear.” Note also the last semblance of actual interplay in “ ‘You don’t know how to ask it.’ ‘Help me, then’ ”—this last knocking on the door, or, better yet, on the wall. Note “Her fingers moved the latch for all reply,” because this feint of trying for the door is the last physical movement, the last theatrical or cinematic gesture in the poem, save one more latch-trying.

“My words are nearly always an offense. I don’t know how to speak of anything So as to please you. But I might be taught, I should suppose. I can’t say I see how. A man must partly give up being a man With womenfolk. We could have some arrangement By which I’d bind myself to keep hands off Anything special you’re a-mind to name. Though I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love. Two that don’t love can’t live together without them. But two that do can’t live together with them.” She moved the latch a little.

The speaker’s hectic mental pacing is fully counterbalanced by his immobility. If this is a ballet, it is a mental one. In fact, it’s very much like fencing: not with an opponent or a shadow but with one’s self. The lines are constantly taking a step forward and then undoing it. (“She took a doubtful step and then undid it.”) The main technical device here is enjambment, which physically resembles descending the stairs. In fact, this back-and-forth, this give-and-take almost gives you a sense of being short of breath. Until, that is, the release that is coming with the formulaic, folksy “ ‘A man must partly give up being a man / With womenfolk.’ ”

After this release, you get three lines of more evenly paced verse, almost a tribute to iambic pentameter’s proclivity for coherence, ending with the pentametrically triumphant “ ‘Though I don’t like such things ’twixt those that love.’ ” And here our poet makes another not so subdued dash toward the proverbial: “ ‘Two that don’t love can’t live together without them. / But two that do can’t live together with them’ ”—though this comes off as a bit cumbersome, and not entirely convincing.

Frost partly senses that: hence “She moved the latch a little.” But that’s only one explanation. The whole point of this qualifier-burdened monologue is the explication of its addressee. The man is groping for understanding. He realizes that in order to understand he’s got to surrender—if not suspend entirely—his rationality. In other words, he descends. But this is really running down stairs that lead upward. And, partly from rapidly approaching the end of his wits, partly out of purely rhetorical inertia, he summons here the notion of love. In other words, this quasi-proverbial two-liner about love is a rational argument, and that, of course, is not enough for its addressee.

For the more she is explicated, the more remote she gets: the higher her pedestal grows (which is perhaps of specific importance to her now that she is downstairs). It’s not grief that drives her out of the house but the dread of being explicated, as well as of the explicator himself. She wants to stay impenetrable and won’t accept anything short of his complete surrender. And he is well on the way to it:

         “Don’t—don’t go. Don’t carry it to someone else this time. Tell me about it if it’s something human.”

The last is the most stunning, most tragic line, in my view, in the entire poem. It amounts practically to the heroine’s ultimate victory—i.e., to the aforementioned rational surrender on the part of the explicator. For all its colloquial air, it promotes her mental operations to supernatural status, thus acknowledging infinity—ushered into her mind by the child’s death—as his rival. Against this he is powerless, since her access to that infinity, her absorption by and commerce with it, is backed in his eyes by the whole mythology of the opposite sex—by the whole notion of the alternative being impressed upon him by her at this point rather thoroughly. That’s what he is losing her to by staying rational. It is a shrill, almost hysterical line, admitting the man’s limitations and momentarily bringing the whole discourse to a plane of regard that the heroine could be at home on—the one she perhaps seeks. But only momentarily. He can’t proceed at this level, and succumbs to pleading:

“Let me into your grief. I’m not so much Unlike other folks as your standing there Apart would make me out. Give me my chance. I do think, though, you overdo it a little. What was it brought you up to think it the thing To take your mother-loss of a first child So inconsolably—in the face of love. You’d think his memory might be satisfied—”

He tumbles down, as it were, from the hysterical height of “ ‘Tell me about it if it’s something human.’ ” But this tumble, this mental knocking about the metrically lapsing stairs, restores him to rationality, with all its attendant qualifiers. That brings him rather close to the heart of the matter—to her taking her “ ‘mother-loss of a first child / So inconsolably’ ”—and he evokes the catchall notion of love again, this time somewhat more convincingly, though still tinged with a rhetorical flourish: “ ‘in the face of love.’ ” The very word—“love”—undermines its emotional reality, reducing the sentiment to its utilitarian application: as a means of overcoming tragedy. However, overcoming tragedy deprives its victim of the status of hero or heroine. This, combined with the resentment over the explicator’s lowering of his explication’s plane of regard, results in the heroine’s interruption of “ ‘You’d think his memory might be satisfied—’ ” with “ ‘There you go sneering now!’ ” It’s Galatea’s self-defense, the defense against the further application of the chiselling instrument to her already attained features.

Because of its absorbing story line, there is a strong temptation to bill “Home Burial” as a tragedy of incommunicability, a poem about the failure of language; and many have succumbed to this temptation. In fact, it is just the reverse: it is a tragedy of communication, for communication’s logical end is the violation of your interlocutor’s mental imperative. This is a poem about language’s terrifying success, for language, in the final analysis, is alien to the sentiments it articulates. No one is more aware of that than a poet; and, if “Home Burial” is autobiographical, it is so in the first place by revealing Frost’s grasp of the collision between his métier and his emotions. To drive this point home, may I suggest that you compare the actual sentiment you may feel toward an individual in your company and the word “love.” A poet is doomed to resort to words. So is the speaker in “Home Burial.” Hence, their overlapping in this poem; hence, too, its autobiographical reputation.

But let us take it a step further. The poet here should be identified not with one character but with both. He is the man here, all right, but he is the woman also. Thus you’ve got a clash not just of two sensibilities but of two languages. Sensibilities may merge—say, in the act of love; languages can’t. Sensibilities may result in a child; languages won’t. And, now that the child is dead, what’s left is two totally autonomous languages, two non-overlapping systems of verbalization. In short: words. His versus hers, and hers are fewer. This makes her enigmatic. Enigmas are subject to explication, which they resist—in her case, with all she’s got. His job, or, more exactly, the job of his language, is, therefore, the explication of her language, or, more exactly, her reticence. Which, when it comes to human interplay, is a recipe for disaster. When it comes to a poem, an enormous challenge.

Small wonder, then, that this “dark pastoral” grows darker with every line; it proceeds by aggravation, reflecting not so much the complexity of the author’s mind as words’ own appetite for disaster. For the more you push reticence, the greater it gets, having nothing to fall back upon but itself. The enigma thus grows bigger. It’s like Napoleon invading Russia and finding that it goes beyond the Urals. Small wonder that this “dark pastoral” of ours has no choice but to proceed by aggravation, for the poet’s mind plays both the invading army and the territory; in the end, he can’t take sides. It is a sense of the incomprehensible vastness of what lies ahead, defeating not only the notion of conquest but the very sense of progress, that informs both “ ‘Tell me about it if it’s something human’ ” and the lines that follow “ ‘There you go sneering now!’ ”:

         “I’m not, I’m not! You make me angry. I’ll come down to you. God, what a woman!”

A language invading reticence gets no trophy here, save the echo of its own words. All it has to show for its efforts is a good old line that brought it nowhere before:

         “And it’s come to this, A man can’t speak of his own child that’s dead.”

It, too, falls back on itself. A stalemate.

It’s broken by the woman. More exactly, her reticence is broken. Which could be regarded by the male character as success, were it not for what she surrenders. Which is not so much an offensive as a negation of all the man stands for.

“You can’t because you don’t know how to speak. If you had any feelings, you that dug With your own hand—how could you?—his little grave; I saw you from that very window there, Making the gravel leap and leap in air, Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly And roll back down the mound beside the hole. I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you. And I crept down the stairs and up the stairs To look again, and still your spade kept lifting. Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why, But I went near to see with my own eyes. You could sit there with the stains on your shoes Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave And talk about your everyday concerns. You had stood the spade up against the wall Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.”

“I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed. I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.”

This is the voice of a very foreign territory indeed: a foreign language. It is a view of the man from a distance he can’t possibly fathom, since it is proportionate to the frequency with which the heroine creeps up and down the stairs. Which, in its own right, is proportionate to the leaps of his gravel in the course of his digging the grave. Whatever the ratio, it is not in favor of his actual or mental steps toward her on that staircase. Nor in his favor is the rationale behind her creeping up and down the stairs while he is digging. Presumably, there is nobody else around to do the job. (That they lost their firstborn suggests that they are fairly young and thus not very well off.) Presumably also, by performing this menial task, and by doing it in a particularly mechanical way—as a remarkably skillful mimetic job in the pentameter here indicates (or as is charged by the heroine)—the man is quelling, or controlling, his grief; that is, his movements, unlike the heroine’s, are functional.

In short, this is futility’s view of utility. For obvious reasons, this view is usually precise and rich in judgment: “ ‘If you had any feelings,’ ” and “ ‘Leap up, like that, like that, and land so lightly / And roll back down the mound beside the hole.’ ” Depending on the length of observation—and the description of digging runs here for nine lines—this view may result, as it does here, in a sensation of utter disparity between the observer and the observed: “ ‘I thought, Who is that man? I didn’t know you.’ ” For observation, you see, results in nothing, while digging produces at least a mound, or a hole. Whose mental equivalent in the observer is also, as it were, a grave. Or, rather, a fusion of the man and his purpose, not to mention his instrument. What futility and Frost’s pentameter register here above all is rhythm. The heroine observes an inanimate machine. The man in her eye is a gravedigger, and thus her alternative.

Now, the sight of our alternative is always unwelcome, not to say threatening. The closer your view of it, the sharper your general sense of guilt and of a deserved comeuppance. In the mind of a woman who has lost her child, that sense may be fairly sharp. Add to that her inability to translate her grief into any useful action, save a highly agitated creeping up and down, as well as the recognition—and subsequent glorification—of that inability. And add a cross-purpose correspondence between her movements and his: between her steps and his spade. What do you think it would result in? And remember that she is in his house, that this is the graveyard where his people are. And that he is a gravedigger.

“Then you came in. I heard your rumbling voice Out in the kitchen, and I don’t know why, But I went near to see with my own eyes.”

Note this “and I don’t know why,” for here she unwittingly drifts toward her own projection. All that she needs now is to check that projection with her own eyes. That is, she wants to make her mental picture physical:

“You could sit there with the stains on your shoes Of the fresh earth from your own baby’s grave And talk about your everyday concerns. You had stood the spade up against the wall Outside there in the entry, for I saw it.”

So what do you think she sees with her own eyes, and what does that sight prove? What does the frame contain this time? What does she have a closeup of? I am afraid she sees a murder weapon: she sees a blade. The fresh earth stains either on the shoes or on his spade make the spade’s edge shine: make it into a blade. And does earth “stain,” however fresh? Her very choice of noun, denoting liquid, suggests—accuses—blood. What should our man have done? Should he have taken his shoes off before entering the house? Perhaps. Perhaps he should have left his spade outside, too. But he is a farmer, and acts like one—presumably out of fatigue. So he brings in his instrument—in her eyes, the instrument of death. And the same goes for his shoes, and it goes for the rest of the man. A gravedigger is equated here, if you will, with the reaper. And there are only the two of them in this house.

The most awful bit is “for I saw it,” because it emphasizes the perceived symbolism of that spade left standing against the wall outside there in the entry: for future use. Or as a guard. Or as an unwitting memento mori. At the same time, “for I saw it” conveys the capriciousness of her perception and the triumph of somebody who cannot be fooled, the triumph of catching the enemy. It is futility in full bloom, engulfing and absorbing utility into its shadow.

This is practically a nonverbal recognition of defeat, coming in the form of a typical Frostian understatement, studded with tautological monosyllables quickly abandoning their semantic functions. Our Napoleon or Pygmalion is completely routed by his creation, who still keeps pressing on.

“I can repeat the very words you were saying: ‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day Will rot the best birch fence a man can build.’ Think of it, talk like that at such a time! What had how long it takes a birch to rot To do with what was in the darkened parlor?”

Now, this is where our poem effectively ends. The rest is simply dénouement, in which our heroine goes rambling on in an increasingly incoherent fashion about death, the world being evil, uncaring friends, and feeling alone. It is a rather hysterical monologue, whose only function, in terms of the story line, is to struggle toward a release for what has been pent up in her mind. It does not, and in the end she resorts to the door, as though only landscape were proportionate to her mental state and thus could be of solace.

And, quite possibly, it is. A conflict within an enclosure—a house, say—normally deteriorates into tragedy, because the rectangularity of the place itself puts a higher premium on reason, offering emotion only a straitjacket. Thus in the house the man is the master not only because the house is his but because—within the context of the poem—rationality is his. In a landscape, “Home Burial” ’s dialogue would have run a different course; in a landscape, the man would be the loser. The drama would perhaps be even greater, for it’s one thing when the house sides with a character, and another when the elements do so. In any case, that’s why she is trying for the door.

So let’s get back to the five lines that precede the dénouement—to this business of rotting birches. “Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build,” our farmer is quoted as saying, sitting there in the kitchen, clods of fresh earth on his shoes and the spade standing up there in the entry. One may ascribe this phrase again to his fatigue and to the next task in store for him: building a little fence around the new grave. However, since this is not a public but a family graveyard, the fence he mentioned might indeed be one of his everyday concerns, something else he has to deal with. And presumably he mentions it to take his mind off what he has just finished doing. Still, for all his effort, the mind is not entirely taken, as the verb “rot” indicates: the line contains the shadow of the hidden comparison—if a fence rots so quickly in the damp air, how quickly will a little coffin rot in earth damp enough to leave “stains” on his shoes? But the heroine once again resists the encompassing gambits of language—metaphor, irony, litotes—and goes straight for the literal meaning, the absolute. And that’s what she jumps on in “ ‘What had how long it takes a birch to rot / To do with what was in the darkened parlor?’ ” What is remarkable here is how diverse their treatment of the notion of rotting is. While he is talking about a “birch fence,” which is a clear deflection, not to mention a reference to something above the ground, she zeroes in on “what was in the darkened parlor.” It’s understandable that, being a mother, she concentrates—that Frost makes her concentrate—on the dead child. Yet her way of referring to it is highly roundabout, even euphemistic: “what was in.” Not to mention that she refers to her dead child as a “what,” not a “who.” We don’t learn his name, and, for all we know, he didn’t have much of a life after his birth. And then you should note her reference to the grave: “the darkened parlor.”

Now, with “darkened parlor,” the poet finishes his portrait of the heroine. We have to bear in mind that this is a rural setting, that the heroine lives in “his” house—i.e., that she came here from without. And the “darkened parlor” is an answer to the question “From where?” since, in the context of the poem, it strikes one as very much an urbane locution. I’d say it is distinctly Victorian, though we can’t be sure, as “Home Burial” was written some time before 1914.

I think you will agree that this is not a European poem. Not French, not Italian, not German, not even English. I also can assure you that it is not Russian at all. And, in terms of what American poetry is like today, it is not American, either. It’s Frost’s own, and he has been dead for over a quarter of a century now. Small wonder then that one rambles on about his lines at such length, and in strange places, though he no doubt would wince at being introduced to a French audience by a Russian. On the other hand, he was no stranger to incongruity.

So what was it that he was after in this, his very own poem? He was, I think, after grief and reason, which, while poison to each other, are language’s most efficient fuel—or, if you will, poetry’s indelible ink. Frost’s reliance on them here and elsewhere almost gives you the sense that his dipping into this inkpot had to do with the hope of reducing the level of its contents; you detect a sort of vested interest on his part. Yet the more one dips into it, the more it brims with this black essence of existence, and the more one’s mind, like one’s fingers, gets soiled by this liquid. For the more there is of grief, the more there is of reason. As much as one may be tempted to take sides in “Home Burial,” the presence of the narrator here rules this out, for, while the characters stand, respectively, for reason and for grief, the narrator stands for their fusion. To put it differently, while the characters’ actual union disintegrates, the story, as it were, marries grief to reason, since the bond of the narrative here supersedes the individual dynamics—well, at least for the reader. Perhaps for the author as well. The poem, in other words, plays fate.

I suppose it is this sort of marriage that Frost was after, or perhaps the other way around. Many years ago, on a flight from New York to Detroit, I chanced upon an essay by the poet’s daughter printed in the American Airlines in-flight magazine. In that essay Lesley Frost says that her father and her mother were co-valedictorians at the high school they both attended. While she doesn’t recall the topic of her father’s speech on that occasion, she remembers what she was told was her mother’s. It was called something like “Conversation as a Force in Life” (or “the Living Force”). If, as I hope, someday you find a copy of “North of Boston” and read it, you’ll realize that Elinor White’s topic is, in a nutshell, the main structural device of that collection, for most of the poems in “North of Boston” are dialogues—are conversations. In this sense, we are dealing here—in “Home Burial,” as elsewhere in “North of Boston”—with love poetry, or, if you will, with poetry of obsession: not that of a man with a woman so much as that of an argument with a counterargument—of a voice with a voice. That goes for monologues as well, actually, since a monologue is one’s argument with oneself; take, for instance, “To be or not to be . . .” That’s why poets so often resort to writing plays. In the end, of course, it was not the dialogue that Robert Frost was after but the other way around, if only because by themselves two voices amount to little. Fused, they set in motion something that, for want of a better term, we may just as well call “life.” This is why “Home Burial” ends with a dash, not with a period.

If this poem is dark, darker still is the mind of its maker, who plays all three roles: the man, the woman, and the narrator. Their equal reality, taken separately or together, is still inferior to that of the poem’s author, since “Home Burial” is but one poem among many. The price of his autonomy is, of course, in its coloration, and perhaps what you ultimately get out of this poem is not its story but the vision of its ultimately autonomous maker. The characters and the narrator are, as it were, pushing the author out of any humanly palatable context: he stands outside, denied reëntry, perhaps not coveting it at all. This is the dialogue’s—alias the Life Force’s—doing. And this particular posture, this utter autonomy, strikes me as utterly American. Hence this poet’s monotone, his pentametric drawl: a signal from a far-distant station. One may liken him to a spacecraft that, as the downward pull of gravity weakens, finds itself nonetheless in the grip of a different gravitational force: outward. The fuel, though, is still the same: grief and reason. The only thing that conspires against this metaphor of mine is that American spacecrafts usually return. ♦

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Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken: Meaning and Analysis

General Education

Robert Frost is arguably one of the most well-known American poets of all time, so it’s not surprising that his work is taught in high schools and colleges across the nation. Because he’s so famous, chances are you’ve encountered “The Road Not Taken” before .

We’re here to help you build a deeper understanding of “The Road Not Taken.” To help you learn what Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” poem is all about, we’ll cover the following in this article:

• A brief intro to the poet, Robert Frost
• Information about the poem’s background
• “The Road Not Taken” meaning
• “The Road Not Taken” analysis, including the top two themes in the poem
• The poetic devices in “The Road Not Taken” that you need to know

There’s a lot to talk about, so let’s get going!

Robert Frost is widely recognized as one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. (Sneha Raushan/ Wikimedia )

Robert Frost Biography

Robert Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco, California. His father was a newspaper editor (a profession Frost later practiced himself, among others), and his mother was a teacher and Scottish immigrant. When he was about ten years old, his family moved to Massachusetts to be near his grandfather, who owned a sawmill. Frost was named both the valedictorian and the “class poet” of his high school graduating class ...and two years later published his first poem, “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” in the New York Independent magazine. 

At this point, Frost knew he wanted to be a poet. But unfortunately, the next segment of Frost’s life would be marked by upheaval . He attended both Dartmouth and Harvard, but dropped out of both before graduating. His poetry wasn’t gaining traction in the United States, either. To complicate matters further, Frost and his wife, Elinor, suffered personal tragedy when two of their six children died in infancy. 

In 1900, feeling frustrated by his job prospects and a lack of traction in his poetry career, Frost moved his family to a farm left to him by his grandfather in Derry, New Hampshire. Frost would live there for nine years, and many of his most famous early poems were written before his morning chores while tending to the farm . But Frost’s poetry was still largely overlooked by American publishers. Consequently, Frost decided to sell the farm in 1911 and moved his family to London. It was there he published his first anthology of poetry, A Boy’s Will, in 1913 . 

Frost’s second anthology, North of Boston, was published in 1914 and found massive success in England. Finally, after years of struggle, Frost became a famous poet essentially overnight. In order to avoid WWI, Frost returned to the U.S. in 1915 and began teaching at Amherst College and the University of Michigan , all the while continuing to write poetry. He received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and became the public face of 20th century American poetry . Late in life, at 86 years old, Robert Frost also became the first inaugural poet at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1960. 

Throughout his career, Frost never strayed far from old-fashioned, pastoral poetry, despite the fact that newer American poets moved in a more experimental direction. Frost’s poetry continued to focus on rural New England life up until his death in 1963. 

Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” Poem

“The Road Not Taken” is a narrative poem , meaning it is a poem that tells a story. It was written in 1915 as a joke for Frost’s friend, Edward Thomas. Frost and Thomas were fond of hiking together, and Thomas often had trouble making up his mind which trail they should follow. (Yes, that’s right: one of the most famous American poems was originally written as a goofy private joke between two friends!)

Frost first read it to some college students who, to his surprise, thought it a very serious poem. “The Road Not Taken” was first published in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic Monthly , and then was re-published as the opening poem in his poetry collection Mountain Interval the next year.

The full text of the poem is below.

“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.

Frost's most famous poem got its start as part of a letter sent to his best friend on the eve of World War I.

The Background Behind “The Road Not Taken” Poem

“The Road Not Taken” has become well known for its perceived encouragement to take the “[road] less traveled by.” In other words, many people interpret this poem as a call to blaze new trails and break away from the status quo. This is partly why lots of people misremember the poem’s title as “The Road Less Travelled.” 

This interpretation of “The Road Not Taken” is debatable (more on that later), but it was enough to inspire Frost’s friend Edward Thomas to make a very grave decision to fight in World War I.

Frost and Thomas were great friends while Frost lived in England, both of them were well-read and very interested in nature. They frequently took long walks together , observing nature in the English countryside. However, Frost’s time in England ended in 1915 when World War I was on the verge of breaking out. He returned to the United States to avoid the war and fully expected Thomas to follow him. 

Thomas did not. Frost’s poem came in the mail as Thomas was deciding whether to leave Europe or to participate in the war effort. While “The Road Not Taken” wasn’t the only thing that made Thomas enlist and fight in World War I, it was a factor in his decision. Thomas, regretting his lack of achievement compared to his good friend Frost and feeling that the poem mocked his indecisiveness, decided to take initiative and fight for his country. Unfortunately, Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras on April 9, 1917.

Thomas was inspired to take “the road not taken” because of Frost’s poem. The same is true for many people who’ve read the poem since it was first published in 1915. The concept of taking a “road less traveled'' seems to advocate for individuality and perseverance , both of which are considered central to American culture. The poem has been republished thousands upon thousands of times and has inspired everything from self-help books to car commercials .

Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” Analysis: Meaning and Themes

To help you understand the significance of Robert Frost’s poetry, we’ll break down the overall meaning and major themes of the poem in our “The Road Not Taken” analysis below. 

But before we do, go back and reread the poem. Once you have that done, come back here...and we can get started! 

Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” Meaning

“The Road Not Taken” is a poem that argues for the importance of our choices, both big and small, since they shape our journey through life . For Frost, the most important decisions we make aren’t the ones we spend tons of time thinking about, like who we have relationships with , where we go to college , or what our future career should be . Instead, Frost’s poem posits that the small choices we make each and every day also have big impacts on our lives. Each decision we make sets us upon a path that we may not understand the importance of until much, much later. 

This theme is reflected throughout the poem. For instance, the poem begins with a speaker placing us in a scene, specifically at the point where two roads break away from each other in the middle of a “yellow wood.”

The speaker is sorry they cannot go both directions and still “be one traveler,” which is to say that they cannot live two divergent lives and still be one single person . In other words, the speaker can’t “have their cake and eat it, too.” The speaker has to choose one direction to go down, because like in life, making a decision often means that other doors are subsequently shut for you. 

For example, if you choose to go to college at UCLA, that means you’re also choosing not to go to college elsewhere. You’ll never know what it would be like to go to the University of Michigan or as a freshman straight out of high school because you made a different choice. But this is true for smaller, day-to-day decisions as well. Choosing who you spend time with, how hard you study, and what hobbies your pursue are examples of smaller choices that also shape your future, too.

The speaker of the poem understands that . They stand at the crossroads of these two paths for a long time, contemplating their choice. First, they stare down one path as far as he or she can, to where it trails off into the undergrowth. The speaker then decides to take the other path, which they state is just as “fair,” meaning just as attractive as the first. The narrator states that the second path “wanted wear,” meaning that it was slightly more overgrown than the first path.

But more importantly, no matter which path the speaker takes, they know they’re committed to follow it wherever it may lead. We see that in this stanza:

While the speaker says they “saved the first” path for “another day” to make them feel better about their decision, the next two lines show that the speaker realizes they probably won’t be able to double back and take the first path, no matter where the second one leads. Just like in life, each path leads to another path, and then another. In other words, the decisions we make in the moment add up and influence where we end up in life--and we don’t really get a “redo” on. 

After choosing their path, the speaker says they look forward to a day far in the future when, “with a sigh,” they’ll tell people about taking the road “less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference.” 

Does this mean that taking the one less traveled has “made all the difference” in a good way?

Saying so “with a sigh” doesn’t necessarily sound like a good thing. The poem isn’t at all clear on whether or not taking the less traveled path was a good choice or a bad choice . So while the poem is clear that all of our choices shape the path we take in life, it’s more ambiguous about whether choosing “less traveled” paths is a good thing or not. That’s up to readers to decide! 

Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” Theme 1: The Power of Hindsight 

This brings us to our first theme: how hindsight gives our choices power.  

The speaker begins at a point of bifurcation (which is a fancy way of saying “break into two branches”). As readers, we’re meant to take the poem both as a literal story about someone in the woods trying to decide which way to go, as well as a metaphor about how our life choices are like divergent paths in the woods. 

Like we mentioned earlier, the poem is clear that you can’t take two paths and still “be one traveler,” nor can you be certain that you’ll ever get a chance to test out your other options. That’s because every choice you make leads to more choices, all of which lead you further and further from our starting point. 

However, the poem also suggests that while the choices we make are important, how we interpret these choices is what really makes us who we are. We see this in the last lines of the poem, which read: 

I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Essentially, the speaker is saying that later in life he will look back in time and see that moment as one of great significance. But we can only know which choices matter the most through the power of retrospection. It’s like the old saying goes: hindsight is 20/20! 

Here’s what frost means: when we’re making choices in life, they might seem inconsequential or like they’re not that big of a deal. But once time passes and we’ve journeyed down our path a little farther, we can look back into the past and see which choices have shaped us the most. And oftentimes, those choices aren’t the ones we think are most important in the moment. The clarity and wisdom of hindsight allows us to realize that doing something like taking the path “less traveled by” has impacted our lives immensely. 

"The Road Not Taken" is also about our perspective...and how hindsight helps us reconsider our past decision.  

Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” Theme 2: Perspective and Memory

The other major theme in “The Road Not Taken” is how our individual perspective. 

The speaker of the poem spends most of their time trying to decide which path to take. They describe each path in detail: the first one curves into the undergrowth, while the second was more tempting because it was “grassy” and a little less worn. 

But the truth is that these paths have more in common than not. They’re both in the woods, for one. But the speaker also says the first is “just as fair” as the other, meaning it’s just as pretty or attractive. They also mention that “And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black,” which is a poetic way of saying that neither path had been walked on in a while. And even the one the poet says is less traveled was actually “worn...about the same” as the first path! 

So it’s t he speaker’s perspective that makes these paths seem divergent rather than them actually being super different from one another! 

Because our perspectives shape the way we understand the world, it also affects our memories.  Our memories help us understand who we are, and they shape the person we become. But as we tell ourselves our own story, we overwrite our memories . It’s kind of like deleting a sentence and retyping it...only for it to change a little bit each time! 

What is your earliest memory? What is your favorite memory? Now think about this: are you remembering them, or are you remembering remembering them? Is there a difference? Yes, because science shows that every single time we recall a memory we change it . It’s very possible that your favorite early memory isn’t your memory at all--it is more likely a memory of being told something that happened to you. Perhaps you have a photograph of a moment that triggers your memory. The photograph may not change, but you do and your memory of the things that happened in that moment do.

So, if our experiences and our choices make us who we are, but we’re constantly misremembering and changing our memories, how do actual events even matter? 

“The Road Not Taken” says that they do. Our choices we make are impactful, but the way we remember them is what helps shape us as individuals. So “The Road Not Taken” isn’t necessarily an ode to bravely taking the less popular path when others wouldn’t. It’s more like an ode to being resigned to believing our choices made us who we are, even though if we hadn’t made them, hadn’t taken that path, we’d be someone else who made choices that were just as valid.

Poetic devices are the tools we can use to unpack the meaning of a poem. Here are two that are important to understanding "The Road Not Taken."

The Top 2 Poetic Devices in “The Road Not Taken”

Poetic devices are literary devices that poets use to enhance and create a poem’s structure, tone, rhythm, and meaning. In Robert Frost’s, “The Road Not Taken,” Frost uses iambic meter and voice to reinforce the poem’s meaning . 

Poetic Device 1: Iambic Meter

First thing’s first: the following is only a short overview of iambic meter. If you want an in-depth discussion of meter, check out our blog about it . 

So what is meter? The English language has about an equal number of stressed and unstressed syllables. Arranging these stressed syllables into consistent is one of the most common ways of giving a poem a structure... and this arrangement is called “meter.” 

A poem’s meter is made up of units. Each “unit” of stressed and unstressed syllables that repeats in a poem is called a foot. A foot can either be an iamb (one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable), a trochee (one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable), a dactyl (one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) or an anapest (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable). 

The iamb is the foot that comes to us most naturally as native English speakers, and the most iambs we can speak easily without having to inhale for another breath is about five. So the most common structure for English language poetry is iambic pentameter , meaning the most common foot is an iamb, and there are five iambs per line. Historically, the vast majority of poetry written in English has been in iambic pentameter, and it was the default format for English poetry for centuries.

But pentameter isn’t the only iambic meter : two feet make dimeter, three feet make trimeter, four feet make tetrameter, and six feet make hexameter, and so forth.

The Modernist poets started moving away from these traditional repeating patterns of meter just after World War I, using invented patterns called “free verse.” Although Modernist free verse didn’t replace metrical verse overnight or completely, it slowly broke down the central importance of it in ways that are still felt today. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is from the very tail end of the iambic-meter-as-a-necessity era. Frost stubbornly and famously stuck to the traditional metrical forms , comparing free verse to playing tennis “with the net down.”

It is the iambic meter that gives the poem its “old-fashioned” rhythm and comfortable feeling. It’s also the thing that makes the poem sound so natural when you read it out loud. You may not even immediately recognize that the poem is in iambic meter, but it becomes clear when you start breaking down the lines. Take this one, for example:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

Looking at the stressed and unstressed syllables we get:

two ROADS/di-VERGED/in a YELL/ow WOOD

The capitalized syllables are stressed, and the lowercase ones aren’t. Each pair of these is an iamb! 

There are four stressed syllables on this line , as well as every other line in the poem. That means this poem is in iambic tetrameter. The most common foot is an iamb (although notice that the third foot is an anapest), and there are four of them.

So why is this important? First, iambic tetrameter is a metrical pattern favored by the 19th century Romantics , who very frequently wrote poems that involved lonely people having great epiphanies while out in nature by themselves. By mimicking that style, Frost pulls on a long poetic tradition helps readers hone in on some of the major themes of his poem--specifically, that the speaker’s decision in the woods will have long-term consequences for both their character and their life. 

The iambic form also rolls off of the tongue easily because it’s the most common meter in the English language. That also echoes the importance of nature in “The Road Not Taken”: both in terms of the natural imagery in the poem, but also in its discussion of the nature of perspective and memory. In that way, the form of the poem helps to reinforce its themes! 

Poetic Device 2: Voice

The second poetic device that Frost employs is voice. The voice of a poem is the product of all the stylistic and vocabulary choices that add up to create a character . In this case, the poem has one character: the speaker. The speaker is unnamed, and it’s through their perspective that we experience the poem. It’s easy to think of the speaker as being Frost himself, but try to resist that temptation. The voice of a poem is an artificial construct, a character created to give the poem a certain effect.\

So how does Frost create this voice? First, note that the poem is in first person . That means we’re getting the speaker’s perspective in their own words, signaled by their use of first person pronouns like “I.” Additionally, the audience isn’t being addressed directly (like in Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise). Instead, it’s as if we’ve intruded upon the speaker’s thoughts as they ruminate over the potential ramifications of choosing one path over another.

Writing the poem in first person means that we’re getting the story straight from the horse’s mouth. In some ways, this is a good thing: it helps us understand the speaker’s unique perspective and in their own unique voice. But in other ways, it makes the objective details of the moment less clear. That’s because t he speaker’s recounting of the moment in the woods is colored by his own memory. That means we have to rely on the speaker’s interpretation of events...and decide how that impacts our interpretation of the poem! The first person narration also gives the poem much of its reflective nature.

What’s Next?

Analyzing poetry can be tricky, so it’s helpful to read a few expert analyses. We have a bunch on our blog that you can read through, like this one about Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night” or this article that explains 10 different sonnets!

It’s much easier to analyze poetry when you have the right tools to do it! Don’t miss our in-depth guides to poetic devices like assonance , iambic pentameter , and allusion .

If you’re more about writing poetry than analyzing it, we’ve got you covered! Here are five great tips for writing poetry (and a few scholarships for budding poets , too).

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

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Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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Robert Frost

Image:     Online       Includes letters by Robert Frost to his friend, the author Nathan Haskell Dole, among other correspondence, and compositions including drafts and fair copies of poems and a television script.   Includes manuscripts of poems by Robert Frost.   Concerns U.S. President-elect John F. Kennedy's invitation to poet Robert Frost to attend and partipate in Kennedy's inaugural ceremony. Includes telegrams, letters, drafts of letters, invitations, programs, other ephemera, and autograph copy of Frost's poem for the occasion, "The Gift Outright."   Includes telegrams, letters, drafts of letters, invitations, and ephemera.    (Henry Holt and Company, 1915)  Digitized from the Harvard Collection.    (Henry Holt and Company, c1916)    (Henry Holt and Company, 1979)    (Harvard University Press, 2006)    (Special Collections at Middlebury College)           Morris Gray Lectures 137 IMAGES Analyze the Robert Frost Essay Essay on Robert Frost Biography of Robert Frost Robert Frost Argumentative Essay Example Robert Frost Essay ≫ Robert Frost's Life and Poems Free Essay Sample on Samploon.com VIDEO ROBERT FROST AS A POET recitation #robert frost Major characteristics of Robert Frost's poetry "The Onset" (1923) By Robert Frost Robert Frost I read A question by Robert Frost COMMENTS Robert Frost Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 - January 29, 1963) was an American poet. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, [2] Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social and philosophical themes. [3]Frequently honored during his lifetime, Frost is the only ... Robert Frost Robert Frost (born March 26, 1874, San Francisco, California, U.S.—died January 29, 1963, Boston, Massachusetts) was an American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, his command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations. He was the most highly honored American poet of the 20th century ... Robert Frost Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, but his family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1884 following his father's death. The move was actually a return, for Frost's ancestors were originally New Englanders, and Frost became famous for his poetry's engagement with New England locales, identities, and themes. ... In an essay entitled ... Robert Frost Critical Essays Robert Frost American Literature Analysis. PDF Cite. Frost is that rare twentieth century poet who achieved both enormous popularity and critical acclaim. In an introductory essay to his collected ... Robert Frost: "Mending Wall" Robert Frost: "Mending Wall". How a poem about a rural stone wall quickly became part of debates on nationalism, international borders, and immigration. BY Austin Allen. Originally Published: August 19, 2019. Robert Frost standing in a meadow during 1957 visit to the Gloucester area of England, where he lived with his family in the 1910s. Robert Frost Robert Frost was an American poet who depicted realistic New England life through language and situations familiar to the common man. He won four Pulitzer Prizes for his work and spoke at John F ... Robert Frost: "The Road Not Taken" 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 ... Robert Frost Poetry: American Poets Analysis Essays and criticism on Robert Frost, including the works "After Apple-Picking", Theme of earthly existence, Dramatic situation and narrative persona, "Mending Wall", "Fire and Ice ... About Robert Frost Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963. Robert Frost - One of the most celebrated figures in American poetry, Robert Frost was the author of numerous poetry collections, including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923). Born in San Francisco in 1874, he lived and ... The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost Metrics. Robert Frost is one of the most popular American poets and remains widely read. His work is deceptively simple, but reveals its complexities upon close reading. This Introduction provides a comprehensive but intensive look at his remarkable oeuvre. The poetry is discussed in detail in relation to ancient and modern traditions as well ... Robert Frost Biography Frost served as a teacher and a source for inspiration for those who came during the summer. In 1923, Frost published another book of poems, New Hampshire. It contained some of his best poems ... Robert Frost: poems, essays, and short stories Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 - January 29, 1963) was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in the United States. Known for his realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American colloquial speech, Frost frequently wrote about settings from rural life in New England in the early 20th century, using them to examine complex social ... The Life and Works of Robert Frost: [Essay Example], 403 words Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, California in 1874, a lesser-known fact about the renowned poet. Despite his early years spent in small apartments in the city, Frost is most commonly associated with the natural landscapes of New England that inspired his poetry (Gerber 1967). His upbringing was marked by financial struggles and a tumultuous relationship with his father, while his ... The Robert Frost Review 2 years. ISSN. 10626999. SUBJECTS. Language & Literature, Humanities. COLLECTIONS. JSTOR Archival Journal & Primary Source Collection, Lives of Literature, Lives of Literature - Modernist Authors. Since 1991, The Robert Frost Society has published an annual journal of scholarly essays, news, memoirs, and poetry related to the work and life of ... The Road Not Taken Poem Summary and Analysis Powered by LitCharts content and AI. Written in 1915 in England, "The Road Not Taken" is one of Robert Frost's—and the world's—most well-known poems. Although commonly interpreted as a celebration of rugged individualism, the poem actually contains multiple different meanings. The speaker in the poem, faced with a choice between two roads ... Why Is Robert Frost the Quintessential American Poet? Robert Frost was born in 1874 and died in 1963, at the age of eighty-eight. One marriage, six children; fairly strapped when young; farming, and, later, teaching jobs in various schools. Not much ... Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken: Meaning and Analysis Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" Poem. "The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem, meaning it is a poem that tells a story. It was written in 1915 as a joke for Frost's friend, Edward Thomas. Frost and Thomas were fond of hiking together, and Thomas often had trouble making up his mind which trail they should follow. Robert Frost Concerns U.S. President-elect John F. Kennedy's invitation to poet Robert Frost to attend and partipate in Kennedy's inaugural ceremony. Includes telegrams, letters, drafts of letters, invitations, programs, other ephemera, and autograph copy of Frost's poem for the occasion, "The Gift Outright." Finding Aid: Additional Papers, 1960-1963. assignment essay homework paper phd report resume review speech thesis