On this day in 1915 Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' was first published in the Atlantic.
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.
Today in Literature has several interesting anecdotes about the poem, one of which says:
Posted by Vanderleun at August 1, 2003 10:18 AM
Frost also described his poem in various ways: it was a satire of an indecisive friend; it was "tricky" and ironic, the speaker more egomaniac and self-mythologizer than pathfinder. One 1912 letter describes "two lonely crossroads" in "practically unbroken condition" and neither "much traveled"; Frost, walking one path, is surprised by a man who "looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other"; he expresses wonderment at "this other self," and at some meaning, "if we could but have made it out."
