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Mountain Interval by Robert Frost

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Saffron

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Mountain Interval by Robert Frost

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Please use this thread to discuss Mountain Interval by Robert Frost.


Mountain Interval is available online.
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Saffron

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The Road Not Taken is the first poem in this collection. We've already had some interesting discussion of this poem on the Poetry Forum. The main question posed earlier was whether the poem's conclusion indicats an affirmation of the choice or regret.


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.
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Saffron:

Thanks for starting this thread.

About "The Road Not Taken," my word, what a fine poem. Excellent craft, as always: the skillful use of enjambment, the assonance, the use of monosyllabic words to slow us down and evoke a sense of the pace of walking in the woods. (I've been noticing how Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. does the same thing in his court opinions and essays, with similar effect.) Today while reading this poem I had a strong sense of experiencing it: visualizing the scenes, letting the words conjure up the trees, the leaves, autumn air (the trees are yellow, and he's expecting the fallen leaves to become black, so I think it's autumn). And the ways we experience memory as we get older: remembering a poignant moment, then recollecting a later time, and then, when we speculate about the future, that future is so heavy with the weight of the past, and of the chain of consequences of past choices. The poem makes me feel the irony and regret when we consider our youthful thoughts that we'll always be able to start over later on in life if one path doesn't work out. I love the openness, the undecidedness, of the last line, because it lets me experience so many feelings at once, the way we often do as we get older: regret, self-doubt, vindication at having chosen an innovative path, deep sorrow at the opportunities relinquished due to that choice. I'm struck today also by the way nature acts as teacher and comforter: it gives us all the images and metaphors we need to make sense of most difficult aspects of life, even as it's always greater than our lives, it seems always to enfold us and exceed us. So that even that endless vista going forward that I always see in my mind when reading this poem is always bordered by a familiar woodland path, birches or aspen on either side, a path one can always eventually find, always a horizon placing a comforting limit on one's vision. Today I also very much appreciate Frost as comforter, as an exceedingly welcome ancient voice, gently guiding us forward in life, consoling us respecting the hardest issues, fate, death, loneliness, regret. I thought today about what it must have been like to have lived in the world before this poem had been published, to never have known it or to have been able to share it with others. Makes me feel grateful to have been born in this time and place.
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An Old Man's Winter Night

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Read "An Old Man's Winter Night" for the first time tonight. I think it's a very lovely poem. It has a transcendent feel to me, in the last lines, like Larkin's "High Windows" or Whitman's "The Sleepers" or Joyce's "The Dead": after this vivid, detailed scene of confinement and heart-rending loneliness and dead-locked down to the ground imagery and sounds, in the end the old man's spirit expands outward, filling the whole countryside. I really feel that sense of overcoming and uplift at the end, in dream, in the safety of sleep. I like so much his gentle rendering of the old man, his forgetfulness, the deep, deep loneliness of the elderly in the rural districts, the kinship the old man feels toward the moon, like a spouse. I admire Frost's extraordinary gift for rendering the sounds and feel of a scene like that: when I read this, I can so vividly see the frosty window, the glare of the lamp, the woods outside, the barrels inside, hear the creak of the floor boards, see the root cellar below, hear the echoes of the footsteps outside in the woods, see the moon and stars in the night sky, the roof snow and icicles, see the old man dosing in the chair, hear the logs settling in the stove. So that when the transcendent moment comes, I feel as though I'm experiencing it from the inside. And he just gestures toward that transcendence, to evoke it: "if he can," perfectly placed at the end of the line, lifting us off the plane of the page. So subtle, like a whisper. Marvelous, marvelous writing.
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on the Road Less Travelled and saffron's question re affirmation and regret:
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
These three lines from the second stanza tell us that he chose the road less travelled only because it was less travelled and not for some other reason .. why would a road less travelled have a "better claim"? In some ways this is illogical - if a road is less travelled logic would suggest that it is less travelled because the road is inferior, that perhaps one has to travel further or deal with more difficult conditions. But Frost says that this road has the better claim, that the road's lack of popularity, in itself, lends the road some particular value and that this value overcomes other possible disadvantages.

As to the question of affirmation vs regret, the tone of the poem up to the second stanza leans toward affirmation, but in the third stanza there is a hint of regret when he says that he doubts he will ever return to this spot:
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
When one says they will never come back, there is this negative overtone, a suggestion of mortality, of death.

The riddle of affirmation or regret in the last stanza may come down to shades of meaning of certain words and phrases. "Sigh" sounds negative, wistful, suggests regret .. but it is not always negative ... for example, one can give a satisfied sigh, but we generally use the negative meaning. How do we know which way Frost was leaning?

I suspect that our modern day, western culture has a positive bias toward the notion of a "road less travelled" (in a crowded, harried world) and the suggestion of a "difference" (making a difference suggests positive control over ones life and doing something useful) but are these attitudes or biases that Robert Frost would have had?
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When I think of this poem I always think of Henry David Thoreau's words:



"If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away."


So, of course I read the poem in a positive light, using ones own internal guide to make ones way in the world. And of course there is sometimes remorse, making one choice often does mean we can not go back to also have a go at the choice left unchoosen.
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Robert (Richards1000) had suggested that we do 4 poems at a time. I am a bit too tired and with a FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid) yet to do, with many questions to answer before I sleep. Carry on with the other 3 and I will catch up tomorrow.

The other 3 poems are:
Christmas Tree
An old Man's Winter Night
A patch of old snow
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Robert (Richards1000) had suggested that we do 4 poems at a time.
I'm happy to slow down and read fewer per day, if you folks want to spend more time on the book.
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So, of course I read the poem in a positive light, using ones own internal guide to make ones way in the world. And of course there is sometimes remorse,
Yes, overall I see Frost's poem as an affirmation of his choice but tinged with the possibility of regret or remorse.
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Giselle:

Thanks for your comments.
I suspect that our modern day, western culture has a positive bias toward the notion of a "road less travelled" (in a crowded, harried world) and the suggestion of a "difference" (making a difference suggests positive control over ones life and doing something useful) but are these attitudes or biases that Robert Frost would have had?
I'm not a Frost expert, but from what I've read of him and about him, I think the phrases "road less travelled" and "difference" had many meanings for him. First is his notion of himself as a poet, and probably his sense that he was a great poet: I think that he felt he was writing on a par with the greatest of English and American poets, especially Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Thoreau, and Whitman, and that he felt a powerful need to write as well as they did, but also to write in a voice that was new and unmistakably his. So "road less travelled" and "difference" may mean "uniqueness of voice and style as a poet".

I also get a very strong sense in him of an identification with New England, and I think this brings up a bunch of interesting issues for him, since in his time, New England was frequently identified in U.S. culture with the past, with Europe, and with old ways of doing things, as opposed to the Western U.S., which was the land of innovation and the future. In fact, he apparently so hated change that he lived much of his life in the woods, away from Boston where all the news of changes in society were inescapable. So "road less travelled" and "difference" may mean his choice to remain in the "old country" of New England, and to distance himself from modern, urban culture: as Saffron says about his links to Thoreau and that impetus to reject modern society by escaping to the woods.

And I also sense in Frost a spiritual or mystical side, which is obsessed with death and eternity and the end of time. So "road less travelled" and "difference" may mean his wish to remove himself from exclusive concern with ordinary reality and to focus his attention on eternal truths, the essences of things, the way hermits and mystics do, denying themselves so that they can become aware of the deeper dimensions of life.

And part of it, too, may be related to his sense of himself as a great poet: I think part of his obsession with eternity and death is that he felt, as a great poet, the desire for his writing to become so famous that his reputation would live forever. I think he may have believed that if he wrote well and distinctively enough and expressed timeless themes, then after his death people would always read his work, and in this sense he would never die. And I think he got his wish.
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