First Person Singular by Wendy Braitman

filed in Daily Life

Taking the Road Less Traveled

March 26, 2010 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Maybe you were forced to read The Road Not Taken when you were a kid, and could care less. But today, really read it. It’s Robert Frost’s birthday.    

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost, 1916

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.

Photo by Art Rickerby, 1962, Life Magazine. White House celebration for Nobel Prize winners.

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