Collection Robert Frost Essays
Choices are never easy- men face multitudes of them in their lifetime. Some decisions to these choices are clear while others are sometimes more difficult to effectuate. The poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is a first person narrative tale of a monumental moment in the speaker's life- Frost can be considered the speaker. Frost is faced between the choice of a moment and a lifetime manifested in his poem. Walking down a rural road the narrator encounters a point on his travel that diverges into two separate similar paths. In Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken", Frost presents the idea of man facing the difficult unalterable predilection of a moment and a lifetime. This idea in Frost's poem is embodied in the fork in the road, the decision between the two paths, and the speaker's decision to select the road not taken.Man's life can be metaphorically related to a physical journey filled with many twists and turns. Through out this journey there are instants where choices between alternate paths have to be made- the route man decides to take is not always an easy one to determine. The fork in the road represents the speaker's encounter of having to choose from two paths a
The repetition of between should give us pause and remind us of its two equally common meanings: between as separation, as in "something's come between us," and between as what might be shared and held in common, as in "a secret between two people" or "a bond between friends." The wall divides but it also connects, if you look at it that way. All the meaning is in how you look at it--how the poem encourage you to think about it. And I said, "I wish you knew more about it, without my helping you." In his essay, "Education by Poetry," Frost writes, Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- On "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" Essence of winter sleep is on the night, Recall that the speaker in "Mending Wall" questions his neighbor's stolid assumption that "good fences make good neighbors." What he objects to is not so much the sentiment itself as the unwillingness or inability of the other to think for himself, to "go beyond his father's saying." Just so; we must try to get beyond the apophthegm-like opening line of "Mending Wall," testing carefully for gradations of tone as we proceed. Is it the proverb-like authority of "something there is . . . " that makes it so natural to equate "something" with the speaker? Once this equation has been made, the reader joins the speaker in sympathizing with this mysterious "something" and hence in opposing the neighbor's unthinking defense of walls. What the president could hardly have imagined, committed as he was in high seriousness to making the life of the college truly an intellectual one, was the unruliness of Frost's spirit and its unwillingness to be confined within the formulas - for Meiklejohn, they were the truths - of the "liberal college." On the first day of the new year, 1917, just preparatory to moving his family down from the Franconia farm into a house in Amherst, Frost wrote Untermeyer about where the fun lay in what he, Frost, thought of as "intellectual activity": And that has made all the difference. The glassy piece of ice - which distorts, transforms and makes the familiar seem strange - is, like Keats' nightingale, a symbol of art. In his dream state (the word "sleep" occurs six times in the poem),
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Approximate Word count = 14336
Approximate Pages = 57 (250 words per page double spaced)
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