Lawrence Hall, HSG
[email protected] The Road Not Taken – Or Was It?
In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
-Edward Thomas
Those of us of a certain age (cough) remember the dim, blue-ish television images of Robert Frost reciting from memory his short poem “The Gift Outright” at the inauguration of President Kennedy. Because of the wind and the glaring winter sunlight Frost could not read the poem he had written for the occasion and so made a quick save with an older one he knew by heart.
“The Gift Outright” would now be condemned as imperialist, colonialist, and all the other usual “ist” suspects if anyone read poetry at all, so it’s safe enough. Indeed, in an arc from Mexico City to Ottawa via Washington the idea of any North American carrying a book is now as unthinkable as Odysseus carrying the Winnowing Oar as directed by Tiresius.
But it was not always so. For most of history literature was poetry; prose was for recording facts and shopping lists. When you read through what is dismissed as Victorian parlour poetry you can see that although the sentiments are often mawkish the technical skills of ordinary people in their letters and notebooks are also very highly developed.
The First World War created such a crisis of culture and a failure of hope that although well-written work continued for a generation as a sort of existential brenschluss, poetry after Frost is often little more than self-pitying, self-referential free verse that connects only with whether or not the writer’s feelings have been hurt today or if he (the pronoun is gender-neutral) has had a satisfactory bowel movement lately.
In 1912-1915 Robert Frost’s metaphorical road took him to England where he hoped to develop a career as a poet. He became great friends with the successful travel writer, Edward Thomas, who encouraged him and made some useful introductions that indeed began making Frost famous.
Frost admired Thomas’ descriptive travel essays and encouraged him to render some of his work as verse.
In 1915 Frost returned to America and Thomas remained in England undecided as to whether to follow Frost and continue his career in the U.S.A. or, at 36, to join the British Army. When Frost published “The Road Not Taken,” Thomas, thinking the poem a criticism of his well-known indecision in most matters, enlisted, and was killed in action in 1917.
Indeed, the poem may have been nothing more than a little joke based on the fact that Frost and Thomas, who loved hiking, often really did argue about what trail or road they should take.
As for “The Road Not Taken,” it is very much alive and the subject of badly-written undergraduate essays beginning with the ever-useless, “In my opinion…”
An acquaintance reminds me that even a very young reader understands “The Road Not Taken” on levels, but that an older reader, looking back upon the decisions he has made in life, truly feels it.
Most of the poems of Frost are as fresh and relevant now as they were in the last century, and worth a re-read without the unholy inquisition of some tiresome English teacher asking you what a line means when it’s darned obvious what the line means.
Just don’t read in public; people will stare at you.
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