The difference between them is one of attitude and degree. He wants the ball to pass through the hoop, only to return to his hands, because for Frost the process—the continuation, the endless creation of endless roads—is everything. But no game can continue forever. And this understanding lets him create his own version of romantic yearning. But it has a road, and the consequences of that road. Back out of all this now too much for us, Back in a time made simple by the loss Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather, There is a house that is no more a house Upon a farm that is no more a farm And in a town that is no more a town.
Then make yourself at home. Weep for what little things could make them glad. Then for the house that is no more a house, But only a belilaced cellar hole, Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest. And the poem famously concludes with a cross between a baptism and the Grail quest:.
Here are your waters and your watering place. Drink and be whole again beyond confusion. This is to be expected. There I rest my case.
Reading it, you feel that if John Ashbery were to write a Robert Frost poem, this is what it would sound like. Both poems rely on the image of an unreliable road that is imperfectly understood by its traveler. For Frost, these lines were equally applicable to poetry, which some people would simply never understand, and which even good readers needed to approach in the right way.
A poem, then, becomes a way to separate an audience into factions. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler.
Divided, we might say, by the road taken. Divided when the process of choosing gives way to the fact of choice. Used with permission of Penguin Press. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature.
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.
In the commercial, this fact is never announced; the audience is expected to recognize the poem unaided. For any mass audience to recognize any poem is to put it mildly unusual. For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognize a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely.
Looking for something else to read? How about …. At least one of these was a massive international best seller: M.
Admittedly, the popularity of poetry is difficult to judge. And book sales indicate more about the popularity of a particular poet than of any individual poem. The second, more persuasive reason comes from Google. Until it was discontinued in late , a tool called Google Insights for Search allowed anyone to see how frequently certain expressions were being searched by users worldwide over time and to compare expressions to one another. Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head Before he hurls the lightning?
Well, just now He galloped his thunder cart and his horses Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth And the clogged underearth, the River Styx, The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. Anything can happen, the tallest towers Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, Setting it down bleeding on the next.
Ground gives. Capstones shift, nothing resettles right. Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. Poems Find and share the perfect poems. 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.
Home Burial He saw her from the bottom of the stairs Before she saw him. She was starting down, Looking back over her shoulder at some fear. She took a doubtful step and then undid it To raise herself and look again. He spoke Advancing toward her: 'What is it you see From up there always--for I want to know. He said to gain time: 'What is it you see,' Mounting until she cowered under him.
She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see, Blind creature; and awhile he didn't see. But at last he murmured, 'Oh,' and again, 'Oh. I never noticed it from here before. I must be wonted to it--that's the reason. The little graveyard where my people are!
So small the window frames the whole of it. Not so much larger than a bedroom, is it? There are three stones of slate and one of marble, Broad-shouldered little slabs there in the sunlight On the sidehill. We haven't to mind those. But we can only know which choices matter the most through the power of retrospection. The speaker of the poem spends most of their time trying to decide which path to take. But the truth is that these paths have more in common than not.
Because our perspectives shape the way we understand the world, it also affects our memories. Our memories help us understand who we are, and they shape the person we become. But as we tell ourselves our own story, we overwrite our memories. What is your earliest memory? What is your favorite memory? Now think about this: are you remembering them, or are you remembering remembering them?
Is there a difference? Yes, because science shows that every single time we recall a memory we change it. Perhaps you have a photograph of a moment that triggers your memory. The photograph may not change, but you do and your memory of the things that happened in that moment do. Our choices we make are impactful, but the way we remember them is what helps shape us as individuals. Poetic devices are the tools we can use to unpack the meaning of a poem. Here are two that are important to understanding "The Road Not Taken.
If you want an in-depth discussion of meter, check out our blog about it. So what is meter? The English language has about an equal number of stressed and unstressed syllables. Arranging these stressed syllables into consistent is one of the most common ways of giving a poem a structure A foot can either be an iamb one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable , a trochee one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable , a dactyl one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables or an anapest two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable.
The iamb is the foot that comes to us most naturally as native English speakers, and the most iambs we can speak easily without having to inhale for another breath is about five.
So the most common structure for English language poetry is iambic pentameter , meaning the most common foot is an iamb, and there are five iambs per line. Historically, the vast majority of poetry written in English has been in iambic pentameter, and it was the default format for English poetry for centuries. You may not even immediately recognize that the poem is in iambic meter, but it becomes clear when you start breaking down the lines.
Take this one, for example:. Each pair of these is an iamb!
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