Then Frost breaks that moment in an apostrophe, claiming that he will come back
and try the first for another day, a sentiment which he immediately contradicts. he
knows that as time passes and as he continues to make decision, "way leads on to way,"
he knew that he could never come back to that moment. To make the decision,
however, he needed to lie to himself.
Wrapped in himself, then, he can confidently predict that he will he claim that he
chose the path "less traveled by/And that has made all the difference." In these famous
last two lines, Frost underlines the word "difference" with as much irony as he can find.
First, the line before the final line is one syllable short, forcing the reader to enjamb to the
next line. Second the word is the only near rhyme in the poem, sounding muddy
against "hence." Finally, the word contains the extra syllable for the line (dif fer ence),
but since a speaker generally swallows that extra syllable (diff'rence), the word sounds
extra muddy. All of these linguistic tricks are designed to emphasize the "difference,"
yet we know that there was no difference between the two roads. Perhaps, then, his
decision to take the other road made all the difference in himself; it made him a liar.
Since I have chosen my path, I have finally broken my deadlock. However, time will
tell if my decision will make me a liar. At this point, the Nantucket/St. Mark's decision
appears pretty even to me, no matter what M. Scott Peck says. For me, there is no
Thoreauvian road that is less traveled by, just a first one and a second one.
In the last few months, Frost's poem, "The Road Not Taken" has been thumping
around my skull, like a one winged bat. Like its speaker, I have been at the crossroads
of a decision, measuring between my future here at St. Mark's and my future on
Nantucket. M. Scott Peck and all of the other Yahoos would like me to believe that I
should take the "road less traveled by," but at the point of this decision, I don't know
which one that is.
Of course, in the poem, the speaker doesn't know either. For the first twelve lines of
the poem, as the speaker stands in the crossroads, he sees both roads as "really about
the same." One road bends into the undergrowth, another is 'perhaps" more grassy
and less used, but four times he writes that they are about equal. Interestingly, the
speaker does not distinguish the roads at all; he does not refer to them as the left one or
the right one. Frost further emphasizes the hesitation of his speaker by repeating the
word "And" in the first stanza and by linking all twelve of those lines into one sentence.
The speaker is frozen between the two paths, stuck in a moment in time. The run-on
freezes the moment.
This lie breaks open the floodgates, because the final stanza has a whopper in there.
The tone of the last stanza is radically different from the first three. The speaker of this
poem, now only a little way down the "second" path, has become more self-involved.
In the first twelve lines, while the speaker was deciding, he refered to himself twice.
But, by the final six lines of the poem, "I" appears five times. Further, he is now given to
the exaggeration of "Ages and Ages" of time in the future.
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