(Inspired by Sarah Hendren’s recent, wonderfully loaded post, “On Choosing”)
An excerpt from Mark Schwen and Dorthy Bass’s book Leading Lives That Matter — specifically, the introduction to the section titled “How Shall I Tell the Story of My Life”:
We’ve read about the reasons for choosing one kind of life over another one, about whom we should heed when we are making decisions, and about how and why so many of the things that shape our identities are at one and the same time free and constrained. Leading a life that matters surely involves making good choices.
Though these deep and legitimate concerns about the place of free choice in our lives may explain why “The Road Not Taken” has been “taken” to be about choice, the poem is not mainly about choice at all. It instead explores the shape of the stories we tell to ourselves and others about ourselves over the course of our lives. The poem is also about how and why these stories change. The poem teaches us that there are two things of roughly equal importance in determining the quality of the lives we lead: the choices we make and what we make of those choices. Our interpretations of what we have chosen to do and of what has happened to us often take the form of stories, and these narratives in turn constitute our inner sense of ourselves, which includes feelings of meaning, purpose, and significance. To put this a bit differently, our imagination is just as important as our reason in shaping our identities and in making for lives of significance and substance. The widespread misreading of “The Road Not Taken” may indicate that as a people we do not rightly appreciate the importance of the imagination in shaping our efforts to lead lives that matter.
When we come to Frost’s poem with these latter ideas in our minds, we notice right away that the whole poem consists of two very different stories of the “same” event. The first story is relatively long (the first fifteen lines), quite indecisive about whether the two roads encountered by the speaker on an autumn morning differed from one another at all, and concluded by a resolution to keep one of the roads for some other time. The second story is much shorter (the final three lines), much more resolute about the differences between the two roads, and concluded by a resolution to take that one “less traveled.” The speaker tells the first story sometime soon after the event and then imagines how he will tell the story differently “ages and ages hence.” The speaker knows that his perspective on life will change over time and that he will be a different kind of person in old age than he was when he first came upon the two roads. He (or she) even knows how he will be different: he’ll be surer in his judgments and more dramatic in narrating certain particular choices in his life. Memory, the thread of continuity in his identity, will serve to some extent his sense of himself even as the changing shape of his life’s story will serve to change his sense of the significance of his past. One choice will have made “all the difference,” and his literally “self” serving memory will move him to claim that he once chose a “less traveled” way, even though he was not at all clear about this matter in the immediate aftermath of the moment of choice.
Like the speaker in this poem, all of us revise our own life stories all of the time. Unlike the speaker in the poem, many of us are not as aware of this as we should be. Sometimes we revise our stories depending on our audience. Would not most of us tell the story of an embarrassing experience somewhat differently to our parents, our siblings, our lovers, and our emplyers? But we undertake our work of revision more often for the sake of our primary audience, ourselves. The readings that follow “The Road Not Taken” will help us to understand the complexities and the vital importance of this constant process of “composing our lives.”
And this is their brief, thought-provoking intro to Frost’s poem itself:
The life and work of Robert Frost (1874-1963) spanned the entire first half of the twentieth century. As we noted in the introduction to another one of his poems, “Two Tramps in Mud Time” (Chapter 2), the deceptive simplicity of much of his work has tempted many readers to offer interpretations that are superficial at best or altogether mistaken at worst. To avoid such interpretations here, it is best to begin thinking about this poem by comparing the two accounts of the “same” event that exist within the poem. We have indicated some of the differences between the two stories in the general introduction to this chapter above.
For our purposes in this chapter, we want to use the poem to help us understand the process by which we ourselves revise our own life stories. So we need to ask ourselves what kind of person the speaker is, based upon the kind of story that he tells and the way in which he tells it in lines 1-15. For example, he seems constantly to second-guess himself and his judgments. How else would you characterize him?
When the speaker imagines what he will be telling about the same event many years later, he offers an account interrupted by a sigh (that dash at the end of line 18). Is this a sigh of regret or resignation or fatigue? The feat that the speaker accomplishes is quite remarkable. To see how and why this is so, think of the story you would now tell about why you made a certain decision — for example, about why you chose to attend one college rather than another one. Now try to imagine how that story will be different when you tell it again “ages and ages hence.” Now compare the two. What does that comparison teach you about how you expect to develop over time?
And why not include the poem as well:
The Road Not Taken
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, as 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.