My son is doing a paper for an English class and typical of students aiming towards Engineering, finding he doesn't have (or thinks he doesn't have) the right sort of mind to analyze a poem.
"There's really nothing there," he says. "Just the poem, and a bunch of people giving their opinions on it. Nothing definite."
Math and physics are definite. This is what makes them easier to do. But college also teaches us to write about things we will never understand. And so he is writing about Frost's "The Road Not Taken." It's a lovely poem, simple of imagery and rhythm and rhyme, and as a well for pondering, bottomless. I'm reading it so I can better proofread his paper later. I enjoy reading it. Rhyme and rhythm assist the mind in framing concepts. Freeform poetry also has its place, but honestly, a lot of freeform poetry is little more than offhand prose written by a lazy poet.
My simple take? Choices are choices. We always have roads not taken. Once done, our sigh may be of regret or relief, but the choice itself cannot be wrong. It's the choice we make and that makes it right. What we do on the road now chosen, how we seize it and make the most of it, is what makes all the difference.
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6 comments:
I had never really read this carefully until this morning. I just spent a pleasant 15 minutes doing so.
Robert Frost was 46 years old, and it is fall--winter is coming. He says he took the road less travelled by and it has made all the difference. He's not a young man, though he says "ages hence" he will be telling this with a sigh, meaning, perhaps, not he, but others who have taken the less travelled road will say the same. But that would make the road more travelled--wouldn't it?--so he must mean some other road, where "way leads on to way" and each traveller makes his choice and, as you say, it is "their" choice, and it makes all the difference.
He is saying we are all alike, but we make all these choices along the way that make us unique, and though we say we take the path less travelled by, so have others, it's just that some other day, that will be some other path.
Which sort of defines traffic flow during the rush hour, or natural selection, or pachinko.
Hmmm, much better poem than I had always thought.
The Road Not Taken still gives me chills. Thanks.
We were up till midnight synthesizing an interpetation from the analyses of several smart-sounding academics and noting how people who find this sort of thing to be easy have a tough time with math while people who have a tough time with poetry do much better at math. There is so much b.s. in getting a B.S.!
I think the problem with poetry in general is that we as Americans are not brought up seeing it performed. We forget it's a *performance* piece, not something dry written in paper.
It's a little like growing up having never listened to music, given the score to Madame Butterfly, and then asked to discuss its musicality.
I have a cousin who is an internationally known poet. I always found her stuff inpenetrable. Then one day, years ago, she gave a reading as an invited speaker at a nearby university. Out of politeness, I went and watched her. It was night and day. Suddenly it all (or at least mostly) fit together.
That's the one thing I admire about hip-hop. It's one of the few ways of getting poetry (albeit mostly bad poetry) in front of people as performance art.
Yes, the dub poets.
Thank you for cheerleading poems that have a scaffolding and structure. It's possible to be so freeform that you fall to the floor in a shapeless heap, and I think most of the modern poets do. I subscribed for a time to the Writers' Almanac of NPR -- lately they seem to have lost my address -- and it's depressing how few contemporary poets can be bothered to do more than "offhand prose", usually about their fascinating capacity for feelings (rather than undertaking to evoke a feeling in the reader as Frost does so well).
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