I Didn't Take the Less Trodden Path, Much

One of the most misunderstood lines in poetry is the one about the 'road less travelled'. We all know it. The guy comes to a fork in the woods and takes the one he thinks is less worn.

People think it's about not being a sheep, about not taking the same path everyone else has. They use it to support their own rugged individualism. It's only when you take a less travelled path do you show yourself as brave and intrepid and unique.

But that's not what Frost meant at all. If people stopped to read the rest of the poem and really thought about it, they'd see it's more about the ego. It's about looking back at the road you took and thinking how great you were for choosing that one while others went another way.

Maybe that's why I've always come back to this poem. It makes me question the stories we bullshit ourselves with. It makes us uncomfortable. Poetry that makes us uncomfortable is good poetry, just as artists might say good art makes you squirm (yes, I'm thinking of you, @holoz0r).

The line actually says:

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

"Look at me," these people will say. "I'm special and successful because I took the road no one else did." Awesome, right?

But Frost tells us the paths are actually the same. There's no real difference between the one leading left or right, uphill or downhill.

Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

The narrator looks back and pretends to themselves that one road is "less travelled," then admits they were equally worn. It's us, later, who look back and tell stories suggesting the path we took was the special one, the unconventional one that led to our particular moment. Then we go quote the last lines to support our own choices.

We need to find some better lines, because this poem is really about how we fool ourselves. How we make things up. We create meaning after the fact. Frost actually wrote it to take the piss out of a mate who was hopelessly indecisive and always regretted the road he didn’t take, as if it would have made all the difference.

The lines, dear readers, are not about your rugged nonconformist individualism or how clever you were to take that road in life. They’re about how we rewrite the past to make it seem like we were fated to do this all along. There was no divine meaning.

What gets me about this poem is how many millions of people there have been in the world, and how unlikely it is that any of us have done something truly radical enough to crow about. Most people make similar decisions, guided by what feels right for our families, our passions, our moral values. Sure, some break the mould, make a lot of money, or become heroes or villains for their difference in a given time and place. I applaud the movers and shakers, the people that step outside the boxes they've been taped up in. Really.

Like Trump, you know. He really deserved that Nobel Peace Prize.

Maybe you’re a little quirky, or you like to push buttons, or you prefer it dark when everyone else likes it fluffy. Diversity makes humanity awesome. But this isn’t a poem that celebrates your un-sheepish nature.

Find a different line where that’s what the poet actually meant.

The poet isn’t lauding his own brilliance like some egotistical twat.

That’s Frost’s brilliance for you. I really love this poet. He’s clever, subtle, and sly. So many of his poems make me shiver. He used the natural world to philosophise, poke fun, tell stories, and explore our humanity. He was anything but ordinary.

Me? My life’s just another in the millions slipping by in the slipstream of time. For the years I’ve been here, I’ve taken many roads. I took the one that scraped my knees. I took the one that left me broke. I took the one that broke some hearts, and got some heart bleeds myself. I tried to listen to myself and not others. I joined a lot of people doing the same — living a little unconventionally because we didn’t buy into conventional systems. And here I am now, living a *reasonably* conventional life in a coastal town, and I’m happy.

I can look back at the sliding-door moments that led me here and think I chose this life, but really, it was a series of decisions shaped by the values I was raised with, my love of nature and disinterest in financial riches, my need to be near the ocean because that's the mother's milk - or the father's beer - I was raised sucking. I was always going to end up here.

That, I think, is Frost’s disquieting, squirmy truth. We're not that special. The roads we take only feel different because we’re the ones walking them and telling good stories about where we've been.

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** I am really, reall being sarcastic about Trump here.
***This was written for The Weekend Experiences weekly writing challenge, and I do realise I'm late, but still wanted to write anyway. Please forgive me - I took the road less travelled ;P