I Enjoyed reading others' thoughts about "The Road Less Traveled." Here is my crack at it.

Some poems might not be meant to bear the weight of analysis. “The Road Not Taken” may be one. Like the pleasant stroll that occurs on the literal level, maybe that is the spirit in which to read this, undemanding and content with the surface. But in this poem Frost makes it very clear that he is talking about something else besides a walk, so in that sense he invites a little bit of dissection of the meaning.

My guess about this poem is that Frost means to provide a spin on the commonplace comparison of a less-known or less traveled path with making an unconventional choice. I’d be surprised, at least, if this metaphor is original with him. Usually, he takes homespun or common wisdom and reworks it or sees how it plays out in real situations, as with “Good fences make good neighbors.”

So what spin does he use? In this poem, he goes to great lengths, relative to the length of the whole poem, to say that the two roads are in practical terms indistinguishable (7 out of 20 lines). At the moment of making this choice that he is to call crucial later on, it is a toss-up. He feels ambivalence and sorrow at not being able to see the other road, but I think the emotion is slight at this time. There is something alluring about the road he sets off on, but it is just a gleam for him, just an appearance of which he is not sure. For him, the attractive quality is that the road might be less used, therefore may lead to places less frequented, more interesting. A different person might have valued the opposite quality, that of being more familiar and conventional. This all rings true to me about decisions we make. We may like to think we use conscious rationality in our choices, but so often isn’t there something we can’t even define or point out that leads us on, just a gleam or glimmering? For example, we might need to take a science elective in college and choose geology over biology because of a vague liking for rocks, but it's a virtual dead heat. We might then find some deep connection with geology as we become acquainted with it, devote our career to it, and only then realize the momentousness of the almost random decision to take the class.

By the time the speaker realizes that that the casual decision made way back was immensely important in determining his way of living, he forecasts that he will [/i]always give this account of his past ("I shall be telling this with a sigh/Ages and ages hence.") What originally seemed of no particular importance has become the crux of his personal narrative.
His "sigh" is in my reading neither one of satisfaction nor regret, but comprehends both, a philosophical sigh recognizing the lingering sense of ambivalence over the choice. His choice made all the difference, but that was a difference of both good and ill. How do we know that Frost means to underline the ambivalence and not affirm that he took the "right" path for him? Look up at the title he gives the poem.

DWill wrote:How do we know that Frost means to underline the ambivalence and not affirm that he took the "right" path for him? Look up at the title he gives the poem.

Very astute observation. Titles are generally meant to provide the ground or give us an arrow toward meaning.

I think I will post the whole of this poem, it is so small.

A Patch of Old Snow

There's a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I've forgotten --
If I ever read it.


My impressions upon reading this poem: Of things cast off and forgotten, sadness that lingers in a corner. The poem itself is a quickly sketch with just enough detail to accurately capturing the moment.

In the Home Stretch is a surprise to me -- a bit of short story. I am not finished with it yet and not quite sure what to make of it yet. I very much like the opening lines and the image they create.

In the Home Stretch

She stood against the kitchen sink, and looked
Over the sink out through a dusty window
At weeds the water from the sink made tall.


Again we see, things unwanted, used up or cast off. The coming together of society and nature, also a theme in An Old Patch of Snow. The gray water from dish washing nourishes the unwanted, and maybe troublesome weeds in the back yard.

Now, I'm off to finish the poem.

About "In the Home Stretch":

Another poem that middle age lets me enjoy more. Tonight it came across to me as a chance to reexperience that strange sense of time that comes upon us when we move to a new home. Viewing objects from our past evokes memories, gets us to thinking about where we are in our stage in life (as the wife reflects on the future and the proximity of death as she gazes out the kitchen window). And all the disruption elicits fear (what if my partner dislikes it, what if we can't make a living--with the French Canadian moving man warning of the hardships and riskiness of farm life; and the wife's intimations of darkness and death, and her craving for light and warmth), and the changed surroundings inspire hope and a youthful giddiness (with the husband like a new groom inviting the wife out to the yard to look for fruit). I like how the couple reach equilibrium by talking about time and how to cope with it, with the wife becoming reconciled to the new surroundings by casting all of life as "middle," a kind of eternal present, and the husband wanting to enjoy the novelty of every feature of the farm while it remains fresh. I like the soft-touch final image, also: he leaves us with light, but we only see it indirectly, from its reflection on the ceiling; I think that's also a lovely metaphor for the love between the spouses. I'm struck, too, by the lines characterizing the town as a place of trendy novelty that the husband, at least, wants to avoid: that seems to square with the "pastoral escape" reading of The Road Not Taken.

"Meeting and Passing" came across to me tonight as a pleasant, witty sonnet in the style of the metaphysical poets. I found the images of the "figure" and the decimal number engaging. I was left wishing he had done more with the "past"/"passed" punning in the final couplet.

Saffron's comments about the paper image in "A Patch of Old Snow" helped me to see the paper image at the center of "Hyla Brook," in the dry brook bed. In this poem I enjoy the conjuring of the mental imagery we experience as we look at actual things in nature, how we're always seeing the past as we gaze on the world in the present. This poem feels like Stevens's The Snowman, as it described "The nothing that is not there and the nothing that is": that wonderful image of "ghost of sleigh-bells", the brook that the poet knows is there only because of his past encounters with it: "to none but who remember long", or because he can sense where it is hiding, underground or in the marshy patches. And he expresses his love for those things: the invisible brook, those old paper sheets that might mean the Renaissance and Romantic poetry that means so much to him; or it might mean the pages of his own poetry that he's devoted his life to: so the secret brook he celebrates here might be the spring of his inspiration, his art, the central interest of his life, but which often isn't visible to others: when he's developing a poem in his mind, before anything is written on paper, he is hard at work, but there is nothing to show for it. Or in these early stages of his writing life, only a few years after having written his first successful book, and he has so little to show for himself yet. I'm reminded of Beckett's explanation for why he wrote: "To get it over with": as though writing were a joyless fate of a person unlucky enough to have been cursed with talent and inspiration. Frost here seems to take the opposite view, stating his love for his work, even when it seems to have failed because the stream of inspiration is dry. He seems to view his talent as a blessing. Frost seems to show a tender heart towards the world much of the time, and I benefit from that. I like the "cold-hearted" writers too, like Milton and Yeats and Beckett, but the warm-hearted ones, like Keats and Frost, give me great comfort. [/s]

richards1000 wrote: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.

What a fine appreciation of this poem, and of Frost, you have. I like the way Frost manages to inhabit this old man's being, too. I sometimes think of resemblances between Frost and Wm. Wordsworth, though there are sharp differences as well. Wordworth happens to have a poem called "The Old Cumberland Beggar" that shows his ability to give us the quality of the old beggar's perceptions and emotions. I thought I'd quote a bit of the poem, which is quite a bit longer than Frost's.

He travels on, a solitary Man;
His age has no companion. On the ground
His eyes are turned, and, as he moves along
'They' move along the ground; and, evermore,
Instead of common and habitual sight
Of fields with rural works, of hill and dale,
And the blue sky, one little span of earth 50
Is all his prospect. Thus, from day to day,
Bow-bent, his eyes for ever on the ground,
He plies his weary journey; seeing still,
And seldom knowing that he sees, some straw,
Some scattered leaf, or marks which, in one track,
The nails of cart or chariot-wheel have left
Impressed on the white road,--in the same line,
At distance still the same. Poor Traveller!
His staff trails with him; scarcely do his feet
Disturb the summer dust; he is so still 60
In look and motion, that the cottage curs,
Ere he has passed the door, will turn away,
Weary of barking at him. Boys and girls,
The vacant and the busy, maids and youths,
And urchins newly breeched--all pass him by:
Him even the slow-paced waggon leaves behind.

What is very different about this poem, as you can see if you read the whole, is its social observation. Wordsworth was more of a social critic and moralizer than Frost. He tells us that this old man, whom some utilitarians might deem useless, has an important function in improving the affections and humanity of others. They see his plight and reflect on life's vicissitudes; they realize their own advantages and are reminded to think kindlier of those less fortunate, even though, as in this passage, they may just pass him by. This is the poem in which a line occurs that was made more famous, probably, by Keats' use of it in one of his marvellous letters: "we have all of us one human heart."

"Telephone" anyone? I just read it -- delightful. It reminds me of a line from the Carole King song, "You Got a Friend".

You just call out my name
And you know wherever I am
I'll come runnin' to see you again

I was poking around online for what others have to say about this poem. I came across a comment that rang true for me. I was already thinking the poem captures those relationships in which the two people are so in sync (please excuse my poor spelling. I am too tired already tonight to make it right and anyway, Andrew Jackson, the 7th president of the USA said, "It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.") that they finish each others sentences. The comment noted this and went further to say the poem captures the strong feeling between two people -- one wanted to see the other so badly that he/she just came to him/her unbidden.

Next comes Hyla Brook. This is just the poem for me today. The last line does it all.

"We love the things we love for what they are."

Frost wonderfully captures the ever changing nature of life in the images he creates of the brook through a year. He also demonstrates a deep understanding of how when we love we attending to details and love those details. I remember once thinking I wanted to memorize the shape of the toes and even the toe nails of the man I was in love with at the time. I think to some extent love is about finding pleasure and joy in all the glorious details of what ever or it is we love.

Saffron wrote: I am too tired already tonight to make it right and anyway, Andrew Jackson, the 7th president of the USA said, "It is a damn poor mind indeed which can't think of at least two ways to spell any word.")

That's a good one, I like it.

Saffron wrote:Next comes Hyla Brook. This is just the poem for me today. The last line does it all.

"We love the things we love for what they are."

As I read over my own post and the poem again this morning, it brings to mind a favorite line from Mary Oliver's Wild Geese -- don't know why I didn't think of it straight away.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves