Collection Robert Frost Essays
Choices are never easy- men face multitudes of them in their lifetime. Some decisions to these choices are clear while others are sometimes more difficult to effectuate. The poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is a first person narrative tale of a monumental moment in the speaker's life- Frost can be considered the speaker. Frost is faced between the choice of a moment and a lifetime manifested in his poem. Walking down a rural road the narrator encounters a point on his travel that diverges into two separate similar paths. In Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken", Frost presents the idea of man facing the difficult unalterable predilection of a moment and a lifetime. This idea in Frost's poem is embodied in the fork in the road, the decision between the two paths, and the speaker's decision to select the road not taken.Man's life can be metaphorically related to a physical journey filled with many twists and turns. Through out this journey there are instants where choices between alternate paths have to be made- the route man decides to take is not always an easy one to determine. The fork in the road represents the speaker's encounter of having to choose from two paths a
Frost's delivery of this unpleasant news has long been difficult for his readers to hear because he cunningly throws it away in a syntax of subordination that drifts out of thematic focus. Yet Frost had written Untermeyer two years previously that "I'll bet not half a dozen people can tell you who was hit and where he was hit in my Road Not Taken," and he characterized himself in that poem particularly as "fooling my way along. >From Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing. For Frost by all accounts was genuinely fond of Thomas. It is erected by all that is primitive, fearful, irrational and hostile [in the neighbor]. " In that weary, drowsy poem the speaker longs to escape through art, symbolized by the nightingale, from the pain of the real world and wants to melt into the welcome oblivion of death:My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness painsMy sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,Or emptied some dull opiate to the drainsOne minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk,Frost's narrator, standing on the earth but looking upward, is also suspended between the real and the dream world:My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a treeToward heaven stillAnd there's a barrel that I didn't fill. Frost's protean ability to assume dramatic masks never elsewhere included such a friend as Thomas, whom he loved and admired, tellingly, more than "anyone in England or anywhere else in the world" (Letters 220). Then one notices how insistent is the speaker on admitting, at the time of his choice, that the two roads were in appearance "really about the same," that they "equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black," and that choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had "perhaps the better claim. Similarly, the apparent meaning of a poem remains merely a formula unless the reader has understood how the poem came to articulate and embody that meaning. " And though this sort of advice went exactly contrary to Frost's notion of how poetry should work, he did on occasion warn his audiences and other readers that it was a tricky poem. The apparently relaxed and leisurely pace of the poem has made us lower our own boundaries and forget who is on what side. " And a riddle, after all, is a series of hints calculated to make us imagine and then name its hidden subject. To tell them is to set their feet on the first rung of a ladder the top of which sticks through the sky.
Common topics in this essay:
Mending Wall,
Road Frost,
Robert Frost,
Ellery Sedgwick's,
Graham Greene,
Amherst Frost,
Carpe Diem,
Silken Tent,
Ode Nightingale,
Apple Picking,
mending wall,
robert frost,
road traveled,
human sleep,
>from robert frost,
>from robert,
frost's poem,
fences neighbors,
wall poem,
traveled road,
fire ice,
speaker mending wall,
two-pointed ladder's sticking,
ages ages hence,
doesn't love wall,
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Acceptance Essays
