Robert Frost Essays (1433 words) - Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost Poetry perceives the irrational mysteries and subtle truths, through rational words. Although it is not true to assume that poetry always emanates its messages from the arcane land of mysteries, but it is pretty safe to conjecture that poetry is one of the means, most often utilized, to virtually ground the invisible and get into the inscrutable. When I started prepping up for this assignment, I read several poems by different poets. But hardly anything talked to my heart. At last, I recalled I had read "The Vanishing Red" by Robert L. Frost years back in High School and had liked it quite a bit. To put it in a nutshell, after spending long hours in the library reading Frost's poems -- which was not an easy task, since Frost has been such a prolific poet -? I decided to write about "The Road Not Taken." Robert Lee Frost, The poet whose poem I'll shortly comment upon, was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. After his father's death in 1885, he moved to New England and settled in rural Lawrence, Massachusetts. Young Frost experimented with poetry in his early years at High School. He did so, as well, in Dartmouth College and Harvard University, which he attended for a brief time. Later, from 1885 to 1912 , as Harold Bloom, a literary critic and a professor of humanities at the University of Yale writes, Frost took up poultry farming, teaching, and writing poetry "often at night at the kitchen table" (13). Only after moving to England in 1912, Frost kicked off his literary career after publishing "A Boy's Will," who got a positive review by Ezra pound, the influential modernist writer of the time (Potter 16). In 1916, Frost publishes his new book "Mountain Interval," a set of poems starting with "The Road Not Taken." Bloom writes in his book that the title "Mountain Interval" suggests the poems denote, " pauses in rural landscape to contemplate the isolation, between settlements, activities and memories, as well as between the self and the natural world " (30). Therefore, before reading the poem one can expect subtle images and connections between the self and the nature. Now that we have a rudimentary knowledge of the background, and the purveying general mood at the time and the place this particular poem was written, we'll try to give an objective, personal assessment of the poem. We start here with the title of the poem: The Road Not Taken First, a cursory look at the title tells us that whatever we're about to read is given to us in retrospect, because of the verb tense "taken." Second, we can safely deduce that "Not" involves a choice that the poet has made. Third, the word "Road" indicates that there has been some kind of a journey involved. So we proceed with our reading: 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; Here Frost ?the speaker in the poem -- introduces his primary metaphor the "two roads." He tells us he is at a point in life, where he has to make a decision between the "two roads." The time is not very propitious of course, for we know that the speaker is in the "yellow woods." Yellow, taken as a figurative language underlines sallow, acerbic lemon-like state. The speaker's regret at his human limitations is quite conspicuous, which reflects in line that reads "... sorry I could not travel both [roads] and be one traveler." Yet, the choice is not easy, since we know that "long [he] stood" before coming to a decision and examined the path "as far as [he] could." The feeling we get here is that the speaker is a mature type, who, to the best of his ability thinks through and examines stuff thoroughly, before making any critical move. However, despite his human intellect and prudent character, the speaker is not able to discern the whole caliber of the journey ahead, because he can't see farther than where "[the road] it bent in the undergrowth." James L. Potter, a Ph.D from ahrvard who teaches at the Trinity College contends that in a way the dearth of information is directly proportional to the speaker's environment. The message here is that we are strongly affected by the company we keep or better the environment we're in (Potter 82). So