The Road Not Taken is a Poem of Regret

Tis the season for College Commencements, and repeated mis-readings of Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken."   Indeed, I attended a commencement just recently where, yet again, a college president recited Frost's poem in its entirety.  I knew that college pres, he's a good man, but it's enough to make a man tear out his hair and shout, "There are other poems guys!"

It's those last 3 lines that really get hammered: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I/I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference."  These 3 lines, divorced of context, populate speeches, ads, posters, and facebook quote walls.  They typically serve as exhortations to not conform, to blaze a trail, be your own person, go forth boldly and so forth.

All of which are fine and commendable, but also misses the point of the poem entirely.  Let's examine it more closely:

The narrator says of the two paths, "as for that the passing there/Had worn them really about the same/And both that morning equally lay" (emphasis added); the two paths, as far as he's concerned, are "really about the same" and "equal!"  These lines lie at the exact center of the poem, just as he stands in the center of two paths, trapped in indecision.

He doesn't condemn the road more taken, oh no!  "Oh, I kept the first for another day!" he says; he wants to try the other path.  Sometimes the road not taken isn't taken cause it sucks; maybe the road more taken is so cause it really is the better path!  But there's only one way to find out, and that's to take both.

"Yet knowing how way leads on to way," he continues sadly, "I doubted if I should ever come back."  He wants to try both paths, but in his heart of hearts, he knows deep down that he simply can't, that this life is too short and twisting, and that most of us only ever get the chance to try one.

Those are the hardest choices to make, aren't they?  Not between a good choice and a bad one--no, those are the easy choices!  But when faced with a choice between two apparently good paths, where neither is obviously better than the other, but still you must choose only one, those are the brutal choices!  Which college will you attend?  Which person will you date?  Which major will you choose?  Which job will you accept?  Which location will you live?  Maybe one choice is clearly better than the other, but from where you stand right now, you can't tell. You will be stuck with regret, wondering about that other path, either way.

Sometimes you get to try the other path, finally; I recently finished Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, wherein a 70-year-old widow gives her once-teenage lover another chance, 51 years, 9 months, and 4 days after she first rejected him.  In grad school, I had a classmate who had worked 25+ years as an accountant, when upon her divorce, she decided to return to school for her English PhD instead.  She finally got to take the other road, but there will not be a third--and many don't even try the second chance.

"I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence," concludes the narrator.  Now, I don't know about you, but when I tell something with a sigh, I'm saying it regretfully. When Frost concludes "And that has made all the difference," note he doesn't specify if that's a good difference.  This is a poem of profound regret.

Now, in saying this, I don't mean to imply that regret is necessarily a bad thing--regrets can be good for you, and not just in a I-did-something-stupid-and-now-won't-do-it-again sort of survival mechanism.  No, regrets can flesh you out, fill you up, make a full human being out of you.  "I wouldn't trade one stupid decision/For another five years of life," as James Murphy sings.

For there are also sighs of contentment, even sighs of victory, aren't there.  When Frost foretells that "I shall be telling this with a sigh," I would offer that both sighs--the sigh of regret and the sigh of victory--are co-present in that same sigh!  In fact, I would offer that each sigh makes the other possible.  The Road Not Taken didn't just make the good difference, or even the bad difference, but rather all the difference, both, together, at once, inseparably!  It's impossible to live without regret--but nor would you want to.  This is the part of the poem that I wish commencement speakers would acknowledge, before they send graduates flying off into the great unknown.

When I teach the poem this way, my older students know exactly what I'm talking about; the younger ones still don't, but don't worry, they will.