Who said the road less traveled

The more effort we make to appreciate and perceive reality, the larger and more accurate our maps will be. But many do not want to make this effort. Some stop making it by the end of adolescence. Their maps are small and sketchy, their views of the world narrow and misleading. By the end of middle age most people have given up the effort.

They feel certain that their maps are complete and their Weltanschauung is correct indeed, even sacrosanct , and they are no longer interested in new information. It is as if they are tired. Only a relative and fortunate few continue until the moment of death exploring the mystery of reality, ever enlarging and refining and redefining their understanding of the world and what is true.

Confronting problems is, as I have said, painful. To willingly confront a problem early, before we are forced to confront it by circumstances, means to put aside something pleasant or less painful for something more painful. It is choosing to suffer now in the hope of future gratification rather than choosing to continue present gratification in the hope that future suffering will not be necessary.

We have been looking for the burning bush, the parting of the sea, the bellowing voice from heaven. Instead we should be looking at the ordinary day-to-day events in our lives for evidence of the miraculous, maintaining at the same time a scientific orientation.

Some people-particularly those whom psychiatrists call schizoid-because of unpleasant, traumatizing experiences in childhood, perceive the world outside of themselves as unredeemably dangerous, hostile, confusing and unnurturing. Such people feel their boundaries to be protecting and comforting and find a sense of safety in their loneliness.

But most of us feel our loneliness to be painful and yearn to escape from behind the walls of our individual identities to a condition in which we can be more unified with the world outside of ourselves. The experience of falling in love allows us this escapetemporarily.

The essence of the phenomenon of falling in love is a sudden collapse of a section of an individual's ego boundaries, permitting one to merge his or her identity with that of another person. The sudden release of oneself from oneself, the explosive pouring out of oneself into the beloved, and the dramatic surcease of loneliness accompanying this collapse of ego boundaries is experienced by most of us as ecstatic.

We and our beloved are one! Loneliness is no more! In some respects but certainly not in all the act of falling in love is an act of regression. The experience of merging with the loved one has in it echoes from the time when we were merged with our mothers in infancy. Along with the merging we also reexperience the sense of omnipotence which we had to give up in our journey out of childhood. All things seem possible! United with our beloved we feel we can conquer all obstacles. 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.

Google normalized the data to account for regional differences in population, converted it to a scale of one to one hundred, and displayed the results so that the relative differences in search volume would be obvious. Better than you might think:. On a word-for-word basis, it may be the most popular piece of literature ever written by an American. And almost everyone gets it wrong.

A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

The two roads are interchangeable. The speaker is standing in a yellow wood with two distinct paths before him. He takes a look and thinks about both paths and finally chooses to take the one less traveled. Thus, he prefers experiencing something new without worrying about the consequences. Therefore, it shows the metaphorical use of this phrase. And it takes all the inner strength I can muster To not repeat that debilitating, self-destructive behavior again.

This poem explains the meanings of the phrase in a simple way. The speaker talks about his experiences in life. He categorizes his life as two different paths. He has already traveled the one that has brought biting experiences and self-destruction to him.

While the other offered room to play Or stand at ease along the track. I took the lonelier road that day, And 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 that dared me to try, And that has made all the difference.

It would have been easy for Frost to write this poem. Frost had a barbed, nimble wit, and he would have had no trouble skewering romantic dithering more pointedly if that was all he had in mind. For both, I learned, were arms that lay Around the wood and met in one track. And whichever one I took that day Would lead itself to the other way And send me forward to take me back. Still, I shall be claiming with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one on the left-hand side, And that has made all the difference.

And this brings us to the final stanza—more particularly, it brings us to one of the most carefully placed words in this delicately balanced arrangement. I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence. But why would it? Recall the final stanza:. 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. Poetry has always oscillated between guardedness and fervor.

There is a sense that, like Thomas Hardy, Frost sometimes saw himself as more allied with the impersonal forces often depicted in his poems than with the human characters those forces so frequently overwhelm. He was much bolder in this regard than almost all of his modernist peers. It keeps us in the woods, at the crossroads, unsure whether the speaker is actually even making a choice, and then ends not with the decision itself but with a claim about the future that seems unreliable.

Ah, when to the heart of man Was it ever less than a treason To go with the drift of things, To yield with a grace to reason, And bow and accept the end Of a love or a season? The conclusion of the poem is a protest against conclusions—an argument, you might say, for delay.

After all, a stubborn sensibility also delays. A playful sensibility delays. Here is Frost from an interview with The Paris Review in , talking about the act of writing:. The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. When stiff and sore and scarred I take away my hand From leaning on it hard In grass and sand,.