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Post by Somak Meitei on Jun 7, 2014 10:04:39 GMT 5.5
I have read 'The Road Not Taken', one of the poems of Robert Frost repeatedly, but something which may be the part of the subject I feel of the poem parallels to some, but to some-I can't ascertain whether it will be unparalleled to them or not.I am in a confused state of mind that I am incapable of ascertaining its probable theme.To what extent does the exactude of the substance I assume especially on the last stanza in the realm of my fantasy lie in the parameter of its probable theme.I feel that the poet knows he cannot take two roads at the same time so he takes what he thinks best.The way he took led him to his destination. He achieved his goal by taking the way.So I think it unreasonable and arguable that the poet feels regret at his desision that he had to take ' The Second Road'keeping 'The First Road' for another day.
What do you think of the way I think,Brother Thoithoi?
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 7, 2014 15:06:44 GMT 5.5
This is an interesting topic, and I think it demands an extensive coverage of such issues as (American) individualism, free will, determinism, and accidentalism, etc. I also believe that making appropriate reference to Frost's certain biographical events would enrich our reading of the poem more than not. I will cover these things in several posts on this thread. The title: The Road not TakenWhat does the title of a poem say about the poem? The road not taken! Is this Robert Frost poem about the road (the first road referred to in the poem) which the persona has not taken? Not about the one he has traveled by? Would a poem, say this poem, mean differently if we read it without knowing its title? Titles work in art (or rather art works) differently from how names and places/people/things in non-art fields relate. “Hamlet: The Prince of Denmark” indicates to us that the drama (or the text’s presentation in other art forms) is not about Othello, the Moor of Venice, or Macbeth, or King Lear. It is about Hamlet and his surroundings centered on him. However, there is no "okenness" in the name "Oken". The child could have been given any other name. In any case, a title is such an issue that sometimes artists and poets don’t give a title to their works. Emily Dickinson did not title any of her 1775 poems, yes except a couple of her first poems. However, I would say that the poetics of a poet who consciously does not title his/her works is different from that of a poet who is meticulous about his titles. For the latter kind, titles are part of the poems. Remove the title, you leave a hole in the poem. So, again—is the poem, “The Road not Taken”, about the road the persona has not taken, not about the one he has traveled by? (There is an interesting tension in the last stanza between the road not taken by the persona and the road not taken by most people but him.) If the poem is not wholly about the first road which has not been taken, this road figures prominently in the poem’s landscape, and in fact the title “the road not taken” wraps up the poem which has a road the personal has traveled by too. In my view, the poem is as much, if not more, about the road not taken as the one taken (traveled by), though the former's dominance in the title. Why I foreground the importance of deciding/seeing what the major concern of the poem is will become apparent soon. I shall be telling this with a sighIf the poem, as the title apparently indicates, is "as much" about the road which the persona has not taken (Road A, from now on), then now, after the journey has ended, he is not so much (if not "not any more" ) concerned about the road he has traveled by (Road B, from now on). Road B is now part of him, his consciousness, and as this one is "as just as fair" (line 5) as the other (Road A), he is satisfied with it (Road A), and perhaps he does not have any regret in having traveled by this. You wanted to become a pianist; you worked hard toward it, and now you are a world famous pianist. The path you chose, the path of being a pianist, has made a pianist of you. Your career, you path of life, is a pianist, which in other words is to say you are a pianist. Your career/path of life = pianist. You are a pianist. You are satisfied with it. No regrets. On the contrary, Road A is not part of the persona. He knows Road A is "as just as fair" as Road B, which he has lived, done, accomplished, and which he is now satisfied with, and there is no complaint/regret about. He knows Road A is a life, a world, rich with "different" experiences, good in its own right, "as just as fair". It was impossible for him to live all "as just as fair" lives, not just this Road A. There may be Road C, Road D, Road E, and so on. He has no regrets about the life he has chosen, but probably this "satisfaction" does not quench his thirst/love for other lives, experiences. This thirst, this suppressed anxiety may cause a person to "sigh" at the evening of his life, when a grand-grandson asks him to tell the story of his life, from the beginning till the end. "Hmmmm", you may hear him sigh. (That does not mean he is sad, or regretful. "Sigh" does not have any inherent association with sadness or disappointment. You can well sigh with relief. Your "sigh" may indicate a lot of emotions (from relief to disappointment) depending on the context, or it may be just the sound of your breath, without any meaning, but indicating the condition of your health, or your shifting from an earlier position to a more comfortable one, and so on.) "That's a long story, complicated." He remembers everything, vividly, and he values/loves every one of the strands/threads that together make his life complicated equally. There are several lives he values, but he chose only one, sadly. It was/is not possible to live all of them. Life is full of blessings, you can say, but we each have two little hands. Life overflows us. The old man is glad to tell his grandson the story. If there is any sadness in the story or in the poem, this sadness is about his not having been able to live other possible but alternative lives, not about his having chosen the one he has lived, for this one is not bad, but "as just as fair". And if he sighs in telling his story about the two roads diverging, this is because he has just two little hands, and life overflows. The problem is he is not God, being everything. However, the beauty lies in being capable of saving/embracing only some, and letting go of the rest, reluctantly. You can't embrace all. There is something sad in this. And that has made all the differenceWhat has made all the difference? That has made all the difference. What is this that? Let's read the last three lines, the story the persona will tell with a sigh for ages, again: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. It is clear from these lines that "that" refers to the events in the two preceding lines--two roads diverged, and the persona chose one. This choice or decision--leaving Road A and taking Road B--has made all the difference. What difference? Well, let's go back to the third stanza (line 10-15): 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. In line 13, the persona leaves Road A "for another day", but he knows "how way leads on to way"--Way A leads to Destination A, Way B leads to Destination B. The way/life of Way A and Destination A makes of you a unique kind of person, Person A. The way/life of Way B and Destination B makes of you another unique kind of person, Person B. The way/life of Way C...and so on. All are different. Once you are on a way, and once you are X, you can not "ever come back" (line 15) to travel by another way which makes Y of its travelers. Each choice/decision sends you toward a particular direction or destinations--just one among several innumerable directions/destination. Road B made all the difference for the persona, as Road A would have made another difference. This difference is important, for if there were no difference, if all roads/ways led to the same thing (no difference), the other roads would not have any charm. Difference causes the charm/anxiety. This difference makes him think it's worth telling the story of the two roads diverging, leading to different destinations, and if you follow one, you "sacrifice" the other. If you want the other too, you'll have an unquenchable thirst, which will most probably cause anxiety of some kind (if you look back) when you are old. |
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 7, 2014 21:18:07 GMT 5.5
I am not very fond of intentionalist and biographical literary criticism. The former seeks author’s intention in a text, while the latter digs into the author’s biography in an attempt to find the source of the text, and thus to interpret it. Whatever intention the author had, and whatever light the author’s biography can possibly shed on his text, these are just among the innumerable other meanings the text can variously have. Once they are made, texts have their own independent meanings, beyond the control of their authors. Moreover, art is not the mirror of life; and more pertinently here, “poetry and the life should have nothing to do with each other”. Last fall, Robert Frost appeared to undergo a savage attack from the novelist Joyce Carol Oates when her story Love, Dark and Deep appeared in the November issue of Harper’s, in which Oates created an imaginary interview between 77-year-old Frost and one Evangeline Fife, a young blond interviewer from a journal Poetry Parnassus, in the year 1951. Robert K. Landers puts the gist of the interview in his recent (19 April 2014) article in Commonwealth, Writing a Life: What Should Literary Biography Do?: Oates in turn received severe and widespread criticism from several corners after the story’s publication, particularly from Frost’s biographers. Probably, Fife’s accusations were right, and perhaps Frost was like that. In fact such accusations against the beloved Frost are not any new. However, the issue here is not about the factuality or the fictionality of these accusations. Pointing out what’s at issue in the story, Landers says: This is an interesting position. A wife-killer can write a great love story about an uxurious husband (better not named), and a suicide, like Ernest Hemingway, can write about overcoming insurmountable forces. That said, it is better than not to have some biographical information of the author (it is no harm at all), in addition to the wide intellectual worldview and all the critical tools you already have at your disposal. And in fact, the piece of biographical information I’m going to share in my next post will surely shed some appropriate light on the poem, The Road Not Taken, specially along my line of reading. |
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 8, 2014 11:29:33 GMT 5.5
Robert Frost (American) and Edward Thomas (British; prose writer, critic and poet) met in London in 1913, and they became close very soon. So close was their friendship that they had planned to live side by side in America. Then Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” which angered Thomas, for he thought the poem mocked his indecision. In fact, at least as Frost believed, “the only brother I ever had” went to war to show he had the courage and he could take decisions.  Edward Thomas and Robert Frost Photographs: Costwolds Photo Library/Alamy. Digital Image by David McCoy for GNM Imaging Thomas’s life at every stage was plagued by his compulsive indecisiveness—he always hesitated, wavered, and this disabled him to do anything remarkable. On the contrary, Frost was very decisive, and his decisions were very strong. Over at The Guardian (29 July 2011), Matthew Hollis wrote a detailed, fascinating feature on the friendship of these two men, touching on these characteristics of these friends, and shedding light on genesis and influence of Frost’s “The Road not Taken”. Most importantly, Hollis recounts two instances in the two men’s friendship which forced Thomas to go to war, and they are worth being quoted at length: Hollis writes further: However, Hollis continues: I do not say "No matter which road you take, you'll always sigh, and wish you'd taken another" explains the poem. Frost did not either. However, this biographical information helps, as any (other) good information does, and it shows Thomas’s chronic hesitation, and no matter who you identify the persona of the poem with, some hesitation like this is perceptible—the repetition of “I”—in lines 18 and 19: 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. Thomas finally decided. He went to war and was killed (at the age of 39) in France on 9 April 1917. |
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 9, 2014 0:32:40 GMT 5.5
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —
I took the one less traveled by Most critics have been reading The Road not Taken as a statement of American individualism, of individuals’ having free will, as opposed to determinism, to consciously/deliberately do anything and be whoever “as they thinketh”, to be the architect of their own fates, and captains of their own souls. (The questions of free will and determinism, the ideas of God, karma, have always intrigued me, and whichever way my eyes turn, whatever I see evokes these issues in my mind. I’ve been studying these, and my posting of the philosopher, and pioneer of the self-help movement James Allen’s work, As a Man Thinketh (I’m serializing it), on another Board, Blogs, (>Thoithoi O’Cottage>Reading with Thoithoi O’Cottage) in this forum, is part of the project.) However, is life really so? Do you determine your own fate—getting whatever you want in life, doing whatever you want to do, being whoever you want to be, being wherever you want to be? Just think, did you want to be the person you are now, or rather did you yield to some shaping constraints pressuring you, or did some external forces coerce you into unavoidably doing what you have done and be what you have come to be? Humans are not as rational as we think we are—we are irrational, instinctive at the roots, and the tides in our mind stemming from our innermost irrational instinctive selves are not our will. Children are the perfect beings to see our irrational and instinctive selves, and even then we try to force them off most of what they instinctively/irrationally feel like doing (for no explainable reason). And as adults, we are very well aware that we live in a very narrow space surrounded in all directions by constraints, which are not of our own making. You want to do certain things, but the law stands there like a pair of omniscient eyes staring at you. You want to remain young and beautiful, but you cannot help, and you take yourself to the ways of the elderly, in how you behave, what/how you speak, what you wear, etc. You don’t want to be ill, but you are ill. We do not make ourselves: we are rather made—the decision/choice we think we freely make is something we cannot avoid, something we are made by circumstances (beyond our control) to believe is best in the particular circumstances, because we have been made to be in the circumstances. We are born into a history, we don't make the history we are born into. We are born into a system, we don't make this system. Moreover, if choice is possible it is made possible by the options already being there, and these options control you and limit your choice. At the same time what you think is best in a "given" circumstances may not be available among the options, and the condition in which you have to make a choice (=circumstances) may not allow any choice from beyond the set of options. If it allows, what 's allowed is already part of the options set controlling your choice and determining the results which may not be seen until they unfold in time. Thus, in the poem, the road is already there, and it attracts the persona for whatever reason there may be. You apply your mind to adjusting the pieces. You do it freely, but not randomly. First, the frame limits the game. Then, you cannot lift a piece from the jumble and put where you think it belongs, or remove one from the bottom of the game board and put it where it should rightly belong. You have to slide them sideways, and up and down. How the pieces are adjusted is dependent on the player’s intelligence—every single player will play it differently, but nobody is the master of their own intelligence. Your intelligence determines how you play the game. Life is quite like a jigsaw puzzle with a frame. You may say you are free to choose from the available options. However, you agree that when you have been limited by the available options of all doable things in the world, your course of actions has already been predetermined before you make your "choice". You were brought to this circumstances of all things possible in the world by a compulsive cause-and-effect chain, which you cannot avoid, and your choice from the available options is (or had been) determined by your own circumstances--how you have lived. Something, whether good or bad, is appropriate (or more appropriate) in your circumstance. You may say "appropriate" is "good", but they are different. A criminal may, in his circumstance, think it appropriate to kill somebody for his safe escape and future safety, but killing is not good, or at least many will say so (even if many of us consent to capital punishment). Why am I saying all this? I was brought to this point by the question—Why did the persona take Road B, the one less traveled by? Why not the other, Road A? Is that a decision (=choice)? Nothing in the poem accounts for the persona’s “taking” Road A, or specifically the one “less traveled by”. The road not taken by most “was grassy” and “wanted wear” (though somehow “the passing there/Had worn them really about the same); but there is no particular obvious reason for this to be a factor of his “choice” if it ever is a “choice”. This second road is as good or bad as the first—neither of them is better or worse than the other. Quite strangely, the second road is said to have “perhaps the better claim” because it “wanted wear” (=people not numerous enough have traveled by this road to wear it, and thus it “was grassy”. Perhaps people like that road more, but for some reason (whatever it may be) they do not take it and thus the road wants “wear”, and therefore people claim it better, but for some reason (whatever it may be) they don’t take it and…so on. Probably, it is the persona’s disposition that led him to take the road not taken by most people. Perhaps he does not want to be like many people, and he wants to be different from (most others), and perhaps this caused him to take the one less traveled by, be it a good or bad one. That moral question is another thing altogether, and there is no such moral question in this poem. This tendency toward the different is the disposition of some people, which is the antecedent of what many think are decisions. In this sense, the persona’s taking the road which he “took” is not a choice/decision. Robert Faggen reads the poem from this angle, when he says: Disposition is, in Nathan Cervo’s word, an Abiding Mystery. Discrediting the reading of “The Road not Taken” along American individualist lines, Cervo writes: Thus, the persona took the second road which was less worn (though the two roads had been worn “about the same” ) because he was “naturally” disposed toward what is less worn, which brings about “difference”. This disposition, or Abiding Mystery, is the basis of for selection. In Faggen’s evolutionary term: Faggen also maintains that “humans ‘unconsciously’ participate in natural selection. All human choices are ironies, often serving purposes other than those consciously intended”. In this sense, it does not seem that the persona's taking Road B is not a choice, but just an instinctive action. In my next post I will write about why the question of choice or determinism matters in this poem. Cervo, N. (1989). Frost's the Road not Taken. 47 (2), pp. 42-43. Faggen, R. (1997). Robert Frost and the Challenge of Darwin. Michigan: University of Michigan Press. |
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 9, 2014 20:51:49 GMT 5.5
Let's assume free will is possible, and the persona independently chose Road B, free from any constraint or compulsion. However, his having been free to "decide" on the road from a set of options does not guarantee that he would not regret that decision, or he won't probably be sad at some point because of that decision. Every personal life, the story of every home, and the history of every nation and of the world--these are replete with regrets because they did things they didn't better do, or did not do what retrospectively seem better to have been done. Humans are not perfect, and they are fallible. Even when you did not make a mistake about something there are times when you retrospectively see there were better things than what you did. Paona Brajabasi reportedly wished "with a sigh" if he ever could live the very life he was living when he was saying that from the beginning again, meaning that he would live many elements in it defferently than he had done. This does not mean Paona was sad and disappointed that he had lived the way he had done. That's just a wish.
The point being made here is not to contend that Robert Frost's persona is regretful over his "choice", but to maintain that it is an untenable argument to say one cannot regret something just because what has been is one's decision.
There is even more room for regret if one's course of actions is determined more or less by something other than one's desire, free will. You love A and want to marry him/her, but circumstances rule that you should marry B. Your emotion is something else that does not follow such rulings, and there is always the psychological possibility of your looking back "with a sigh" to your past and imagining living another, "different" life.
It may not necessarily be a regret or sadness (yes, a feeling of regret or sadness is not impossible), but a sigh is absolutely normal to a healthy mind. The intensity of that feeling will vary from person to person, and its in/conspicuousness--that's another thing. But the feeling is there.
(To be continued)
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Post by Somak Meitei on Jun 10, 2014 23:03:00 GMT 5.5
What I opine about the poem is streaming dirtily in my mind-- what I mean by my substandard expression is that what I have in my mind about the poem is being wrong with those who are strongly,confidently and rightfully standing about their sensibility about the poem. I would say it feebly that as an engrossing reader of the poem inspite of being a student without biographical knowledge that the poet made his choice of the second road intentionlly because of the fact that it was the experimentable way though there might have the probability of happening a great many dangerous things to him, but he was determined to risk his life to face whatever might happen because of his inventive mind.Before he was rewarded for his relentless and daring effort with a different life by the second road, he had encountered many a formidable obstacle so he sighed with relief that he could achieve what he wished.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 11, 2014 9:28:13 GMT 5.5
My reading of the poem, as I noted above, is not influenced by the biographical information I have of the poet and the circumstances that inspired him to write this poem. The information, if it has somehow gone into my reading, was just one of the several threads necessitating its incorporation, which is better than not, rather than it demanding the other threads as a justificatory explanation.
Quite on the contrary, Somak's reading seems to be quite biographical, for he seems to read the persona as Robert Frost, who, as it were, "chose" the relatively less taken path of the poet, and has become different, won prizes, became famous and almost immortal.
However, the poem's text does not say anything about the persona's having "encountered hardships" and getting finally rewarded for it. The poem does apply to every walk of life, and everybody's life, not specifically to a great man's life. All roads (=all walks of life) are equally good, none is better than the other--from street-sweeping to Presidentship. If any is better for one, that's one's personal "choice" or one's inclination. Some want teaching, some hate it; some want to be in politics, some hate it; some love being porn stars, many don't want it publicly, and so on. All roads (=walks of life) diverge there, and they lie there "about the same". Each person "takes" which they feel more inclined toward. They choose what they like--they first like it, and then they choose it. They don't know why they like it. Some may give reasons, but the factors of their liking what they like is something their "free intention" doesn't control.
Whether a free choice or a determined one, the poem does not, it seems to me, say anything about any achievement. Any other road leads to other achievements. The point the poem wants to emphadize is the "difference" that every road can make from every other. It is possible for one to be just one person (=live just one life), not two or more. I did some painting. I did some sculpture. I did some singing. I did some dancing. I wanted to be a scientist, a physicist. I left them all, one after another--all of them. I stil love them, I still have got the guts. Whenever I talk with my friends in these fields, say whenever I talk with a painter friend about those times, I sigh. Why? Not because I'm relieved (why would I feel relieved), but because I loved them and I could not possibly "travel" those walks of life, and even as an old lover with the flame still burning though faintly in my heart, I'm sad, nostalgic (but not sorry or regretful, though I may be depressed at times though I'm fine with who I've been now), but I know it's all over. This is a human condition, and depending on people's psychological "composition" they will react to these facts differently.
This is how I understand the poem, and more than that, life.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 11, 2014 10:10:14 GMT 5.5
If anybody assumes the speaker of the poem to be Robert Frost himself, there is a danger in that. The speaker of a poem is not necessarily the poet, and in many cases this biographical reading poses extraordinary problems.
Regarding The Road not Taken, by the time when Frost wrote it, he had not made a name as a poet for which he would later be renowned. Biographically (if we assume the poet as speaking the poem), the poet had not yet made any difference when he wrote this poem, and I can't quite believe he engaged in some kind of prophesizing in this poem.
And if we don't assume Frost to be speaking the poem, there is no hint in the text of the persona having "encountered hardships" (biographically, Frost did not have anything like this--he was a happy man) and made "achievements". As regards achievement, there can be and in fact are achievements in every walk of life. It would, therefore, be too restricted a reading to associate the persona with achievements. The poems applies to every kind of person of whatever social status.
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Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Jun 18, 2014 12:13:59 GMT 5.5
Here is an interesting article-- Blame Your Brain: The Fault Lies Somewhere Within. How un/related this article is to the topic of our discussion--perhaps, that depends on your brain  . In any case, the article with all the hyperlinks (links to other articles) is a very good one, beyond my interest in this poem. |
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. In any case, the article with all the hyperlinks (links to other articles) is a very good one, beyond my interest in this poem.