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Essay on Frost on the Doorstep and Lyricism at the Millennium Katherine Kearns
Every moment of decision is a nexus of possibilities, a fork in the road through the future. In deciding which path to walk, we try to judge what lies ahead: where each path will lead us and what we are likely to encounter along the way. In his poem "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost (1915/ 1971) wrote of his confrontation with such a choice:
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. (Kearns 270)
In the poem, Frost's narrator uses precisely these factors to decide between the two paths he confronts. One path, he decides, presents intangible but significant benefits that will be sacrificed if he chooses to walk the other. He begins by assessing the virtues of each path. After looking down one as far as he could, he
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear.
The narrator admits that this difference in wear is not a very large one: "Though as for that the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same." But even minor differences may produce significant advantages. In the poem's final stanza, the narrator declares the advantage that this slightly less-worn path presents over the other. He imagines his future self looking back at this moment of decision. Taking the road "less traveled by," he pronounces, "has made all the difference."
But is this unconventional benefit truly an opportunity cost of the other road? If the narrator had chosen to walk "the road not taken," would he necessarily have sacrificed the benefits to be obtained by walking the other? Frost's narrator answers this question in part by establishing that the unconventional benefits are unique to the road that he has chosen..............
