by Jay Parini (1997).
Columbia University Press, New York.
Lionel Trilling first emphasized the dark side of Robert Frost at a party in New York on the occasion of the poet's eighty-fifth birthday. As reprinted in Robert Frost (1962, edited by James M. Cox), Trilling said,
I have to say that my Frost is not the Frost I seem to perceive existing in the minds of so many of his admirers. He is not the Frost who confounds the characteristically modern practice of poetry by his notable democratic simplicity of utterance: on the contrary. He is not the Frost who controverts the bitter modern astonishment of human life: the opposite is so. He is not the Frost who reassures us by his affirmation of old virtues, simplicities, pieties, and ways of feeling anything but.
Trilling went on to compare Frost to Sophocles, "the poet people loved most. . . because he made plain to them the terrible things of human life."
Trilling drew attention to some of Frost's best work, such as "Design, " "Acquainted with the Night, " and "Desert Places," poems as chilling, as redolent of evil, as anything Franz Kafka ever wrote. Indeed, "Design" takes the old argument—that the sheer existence of design in the universe argues for the existence of God—and turns it on its head, showing us a ghastly scene: a blighted spider killing a white moth on a bleached-out flower. "What but design of darkness to appall?" he asks, the word appall echoing through its Latin root, meaning to 'make white.' It would be nothing less than foolish to read Frost as a simple purveyor of homely truths and Yankee wisdom.
It would also be a mistake to imagine that Frost is easy to understand because he is easy to read. Even poems that focus on casual country scenes, such as "Spring Pools" or "The Road Not Taken," can be maddeningly difficult. They are certainly deceptive. The latter, one of Frost's most popular poems, is worth examining in detail:
Two roads diverted 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 diverted in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Usually quoted out of context, the last three lines are among the best known in modern poetry. They are commonly paraphrased as follows: "Life often presents two choices : the well-trodden path and the more rugged, unworn path, the path of individualism. Frost advises the reader to follow him, to take the unconventional route, because that—for him—made all the difference; that is, the poet's nonconformity accounts for his happiness and success." This is a crude but not uncommon summary of how many, perhaps most, readers have interpreted these lines. In public performances and interviews, Frost himself encouraged this kind of misreading. Nonetheless, one must listen to the advice of D. H. Lawrence and trust the tale, not the teller. A close look at the poem reveals that Frost's walker encounters two nearly identical paths; so he insists, repeatedly. The walker looks down first one, then the other, "as just as fair." Indeed, "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." As if the reader hasn't gotten the message, Frost says for a third time: "And both that morning equally lay /In leaves no step had trodden black." What, then, can we make of the final stanza? My guess is that Frost, the wily ironist, is saying something like this: "When I am old, like all old men, I shall make a myth of my life. I shall pretend, as we all do, that I took the less traveled road. But I shall be lying." Frost signals the mockingly self-inflated tone of the last stanza by repeating the word I, which rhymes—several times—with the inflated word sigh. Frost wants the reader to know that what he will be saying, that he took the road less traveled, is a fraudulent position.
"The Road Not Taken," like so much in Frost, resists easy interpretation. The poet presents contradictory readings within the same poem, tempting the reader this way, then that.