One pos­i­tive con­se­quence of the lock­down has been, for me and sure­ly for many oth­ers, the re-dis­cov­ery of the ben­e­fits of walk­ing the trails near one’s home. Vir­tu­al­ly every day through­out this peri­od I have strode out and delved into the woods, walk­ing wher­ev­er the mood takes me and dis­cov­er­ing that the myr­i­ad of criss-cross­ing trails allow for a near-infi­nite choice of dif­fer­ent routes to take. Cou­pled with the coin­ci­dent good weath­er and the sea­son­al bloom­ing of the blue­bells, these jaunts have been a source of great plea­sure.

Occa­sion­al­ly, I make out a quite faint trail, per­haps once used but for some rea­son now large­ly untrod­den and over­grown, and I take it, putting me in mind of that famous poem The Road Not Tak­en by the Amer­i­can Robert Frost, in which he says:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less trav­eled by

This idea of “The Road Not Tak­en” has tak­en off in the pub­lic imag­i­na­tion and you can find its key lines on mugs, fridge mag­nets and in greet­ing cards, and it has an Eat-Pray-Love-style vibe about it. Of course, the first inter­pre­ta­tion a read­er is like­ly to leap to, read­ing the lines above, is one of indi­vid­u­al­ism and self-asser­tion (“I don’t go with the main­stream, me”), but actu­al­ly, when you read the poem, it’s not quite that sim­ple: the two ways “equal­ly lay / In leaves no step had trod­den black” and “the pass­ing there / Had worn them real­ly about the same”, which is to say, they’re inter­change­able. So it’s not real­ly about well-trod­den ver­sus untrod­den, or going with or against the crowd; it’s a sub­tler com­men­tary about ran­dom choic­es, about freewill ver­sus deter­min­ism. Like in the movie Slid­ing Doors, some split-sec­ond, this-way-or-that-way choic­es are bound to beget marked­ly dif­fer­ent con­se­quences, but you can nev­er know before­hand which is right. Such is life.

What­ev­er its inter­pre­ta­tion, its gen­e­sis actu­al­ly sprung from a sur­pris­ing­ly lit­er­al source. Frost spent the years 1912–1915 in Eng­land, where he befriend­ed Eng­lish-Welsh poet Edward Thomas who, when out walk­ing with Frost, would often regret not hav­ing tak­en a dif­fer­ent path and would sigh over what they might have seen and done. Frost liked to tease Thomas: “No mat­ter which road you take, you always sigh and wish you’d tak­en anoth­er!”.

So it’s iron­ic that Frost ini­tial­ly meant the poem to be some­what light-heart­ed when it turned out to be any­thing but. It’s the hall­mark of the true poet, though, to take an every­day expe­ri­ence and trans­form it into some­thing much more. Frost cer­tain­ly suc­ceeds in imbu­ing his short poem with an enig­mat­ic appeal. Here it is in full, and may the roads you choose in life’s jour­ney be the right ones!

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.