This understanding calls for careful consideration when making important decisions in life because once a choice has been made, there is no going back. As such, if the wrong choice is made, the decision-maker has to live with the consequences therein. The poet takes the reader through a journey of emotional turmoil trying to make the right decision because the path chosen defines the future and life’s destination. However, the narrator does not know what lies ahead, thus any choice can be good or bad. The speaker arrives at a junction on a road and he has to decide which route to take. The title captures the attention of the reader by arousing curiosity to find out about this road that is not taken, and ultimately, the poem addresses this issue by talking about the road and its implications in life. The poem has a rigid rhyme scheme of ABAAB with four stanzas each with five lines. If Frost’s most famous poem is representative, and if Orr is right about it, we should see Frost not as the earnest Yankee sage beloved by junior high school teachers or the dark jokester expounded by college professors, but as an artist able to evoke and clarify the conflicts that follow from the ways we think we understand ourselves.In his ambiguous poem “The Road Not Taken”, Robert Frost speaks about life choices and how critical decisions shape one’s life in the long run, or, perhaps, forever. This holds for the poet as well as the poem. Orr - who writes the On Poetry column for the Book Review - is the first person to argue this at length for a popular audience, and he’s persuasive enough to give us good reason to hope that his interpretation will lodge a toehold in conventional wisdom. The options “blur and merge,” Orr writes they are “like overlapping ghosts.” As he evocatively puts it, “Two potential poems revolve around each other, separating and overlapping like clouds in a way that leaves neither reading perfectly visible.” It might have changed him deeply, it might not have. His decision might have been arbitrary, it might have been meaningful. It doesn’t accept or reject its myth of choice but sets us up to feel the tensions involved in having to choose, as if each reader were the traveler. Yet according to the corrective that David Orr offers in “The Road Not Taken,” his new book-length analysis, the poem is neither an ode nor a dark joke but somehow both at once. It was an arbitrary choice, this national myth of choosing independently and bravely and becoming the sum of your choices or finding yourself. The other looked as grassy, as trodden, as easy or hard or distinctive. The traveler hasn’t been changed by his choice of a long and lonely road, but tells us that he’s going to tell that story when he’s older, even though he had no particular reason to choose the road he took. As interpreted in The New Yorker or “Orange Is the New Black,” the poem is not in fact an ode to individualism but a joke at the expense of individualist hokum. Most of us have also heard the story that says this is all bunk. That poem is “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost, and its subject is familiar to most of us who attended an American or a Yankophilic middle school at some point in the last century: A traveler comes to a fork in the woods and, after sweating over his direction in life, takes the road less traveled, and it makes all the difference. David Orr has written the best popular explanation to date of the most popular poem in American history.
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