"The Road Not Taken" was written by Robert Frost to mock his good friend, Edward Thomas, about his indecisiveness on their forest hikes. And how he always lamented they should have gone another way.

Frost essentially says that both paths are the same and that attributing any significance to choosing one above the other is nonsense. But the background that inspired the poem tells a completely different story.

On one of their walks, the two poets were confronted by a gamesman who threatened to shoot them. The defiant Frost confronted the man, who was armed, but Thomas backed away. Thomas internalized this event as shame and cowardice. And so he enlisted for the British Army in WWI to prove his bravery, or perhaps to find out what it meant to be brave.

He was slain at the Battle of Arras in 1917.

The poem written in jest and mockery reveals a salient and transcendental truth: there are no small decisions. Perhaps if Thomas and Frost had picked a road more traveled, events would have unfolded in an entirely different manner. Perhaps if Frost would have not sent Thomas the poem, which he received in earnest, he never would have enlisted. All decisions are interconnected, and "knowing how way leads onto way" one never may return to the circumstances from which they departed. The most seemingly inconsequential choices in life have the ability to put one ultimately on the road to peril or tranquility.

"I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference."

  • RealAssHistoryHours [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

    Then took the other, just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

    And both that morning equally lay In leaves, no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

    I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.