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.