![]() For example, there is the cliché, “you can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” There the symmetry is obvious as the figure spans such a short stretch of time. In the small it’s a rhetorical figure called chiasmus. It’s a verbal structure that’s symmetrical about a mid-point. ![]() That kind of list is what’s meant by ring-form or ring-composition. So: 1) Leave home 2) The old sycamore 3) Margie’s house 4) The place where the little yappy schnauzer lives 5) Store 4’) The place where the little yappy schnauzer lives 3’) Margie’s house 2’) The old sycamore 1’) Arrive Home Along the way you take note of landmarks and, on returning, you notice them again. What’s ring-form, or ring-composition? Imagine that you leave your place, walk a couple of blocks to the convenience store, purchase a quart of milk, and then return home by the same route. When I reread this poem, for the first time in decades, I was struck by two things: 1) that odd locution in lines 2 and 3, of being one traveler, and, especially, 2) line 16, “I shall be telling…” But let’s set those aside for a moment.įor I also had a sense that this might be a ring-form poem. 16 I shall be telling this with a sigh 17 Somewhere ages and ages hence: 18 Two roads diverged in a wood, and I- 19 I took the one less traveled by, 20 And that has made all the difference. 13 Oh, I kept the first for another day! 14 Yet knowing how way leads on to way, 15 I doubted if I should ever come back. The Poem 1 Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, 2 And sorry I could not travel both 3 And be one traveler, long I stood 4 And looked down one as far as I could 5 To where it bent in the undergrowth 6 Then took the other, as just as fair, 7 And having perhaps the better claim, 8 Because it was grassy and wanted wear 9 Though as for that the passing there 10 Had worn them really about the same, 11 And both that morning equally lay 12 In leaves no step had trodden black. Otherwise, read it, slowly, perhaps even out loud. If you know it well, you can skip over the words (though note that I’ve added line numbers to facilitate analysis). But I’m willing to take a look at the poem and see if I can come up with something that avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of pop individualism and professional knowingness. But what if there’s something going on in the poem that isn’t adequately captured by limning its meaning?Ībout a decade after Frost published “The Road Not Taken” Archibald MacLeish told us “A poem should not mean / But be.” Is there a way to approach a poem’s being rather than its meaning? “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. ![]() That just won’t wash, not when you actually read the words carefully.Īccording to this reading, then, the speaker will be claiming “ages and ages hence” that his decision made “all the difference” only because this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). Everyone else hightailed it down the popular road but me, individualist that I am, I took the less popular road, and it turned out darn well. The common understanding, Orr tells us, is that the poem is about staunch individualism. It'll take a pretty determined individualist to take this road that's not been travelled in a looong time. It’s by David Orr, poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review, and is an excerpt from a book he’s devoted to that one poem. So I read the posted snippet, which was about “The Road Not Taken” – I’ve read that one, I think, said I to myself, but it’s not the one about miles to do until we eat? pray? love? one of those basic things – and then followed the link the full article, which is in the Paris Review. This post had an intriguing title: “The Most Misread Poem in America”. ![]() But then who knows what really goes on in the minds of those kindly uncles, eh? He’s sort of the Walt Disney of American poetry, him and Carl Sandburg, but apparently Frost had a nasty side as well. I, being an American citizen in good standing, know a bit about Frost. After I’d sat myself down at my computer on Tuesday morning, and after I’d checked in at my blog, New Savanna, and at Facebook, I zoomed here to 3QD, as I often do, and saw a link to an article about a Robert Frost poem.
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