! Travelling With Robert Frost

Everyone but poets (who have their own allegiances) would acknowledge it – you were, and I guess still are, the most famous and popular poet of the 20th century – to Americans at least; though since we’re now into the 21st century, it’s appropriate that you’re being pushed hard, even overtaken, at least in the charts here on Poemhunter.com by the Afro-American and Spanish-American poets; and your ‘The Road Not Taken’ is currently lying around fifth place to the favourite poems of those guys it must be the most inappropriate poem title ever given since you don’t tell us anything about the road you didn’t take – and come to think of it not much about the road you did take – except – and that’s so ‘you’ – that it ‘has made all the difference’ – without telling us what that difference was or is… but then, that’s you: prose doesn’t appreciate much, if any ambiguity; but it’s the stock-in-trade of poetry, where – as it’s fashionable to say – the reader re-writes the poem for themselves; and ambiguity is certainly your thoughty-forte… OK the first line then, since we’re on this road together (whichever) : like Dante, you’re discovered in the middle of a dense wood; though (unusually in woods except those planted for cutting) there’s some kinda crossroads there; though of course that’s a neat Dantean metaphor too.. and it’s yellow, which means autumn/Fall, most spectacular in the New England area – how easy to forget that you lived your first eleven years in San Francisco – and wrote this poem in Old England, not the New; and before you became the famous you.. As for the second stanza, Mister Ambiguous – there’s just a sneaky feeling that it was the obligation to rhyme that makes you imply, that you were adventurous, but there wasn’t really much to choose between them… and right to the end of this famous poem you leave us with this ambiguity: sticking onto the road ‘less travelled’ the little word ‘by’ – hinting that both roads get you to much the same place in the end… then tell us that that ‘has made all the difference’…like, uh? so there you are – that’s poetry: scholars, academics, pull it to bits to find out what makes it tick— whether it’s a heart, or just wind-up clockwork – yet out there where people just read poems to aid their deepest lives - deep in the springtime thicket of their life or even later, in the yellow wood – out there, in there, hesitating at the crossroads looking for some sign; knowing deep inside that ‘way leads on to way’ – this is the poem which for so many their life’s heart has lived with. And that is how it is.