‘The Road Not Taken’: a poem for our times

Radio 4’s Today programme has taken to poetry. Each day during the Coronavirus emergency, a presenter or reporter reads a poem of their choice and tells us why it’s become important to them. It’s a much-needed moment of respite from the relentless news of suffering that dominates the news just now. 

Today Justin Webb read Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’. Here it is, for any of you who don’t know it off by heart. (Note to self: memorise it for your personal knapsack of well-tried resources to bring out when you need them.)

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.

I was touched as I listened this morning. I knew the poem so well, but because my emotions were sensitised in this time of crisis and palpable fear, it seemed as if I was hearing it for the first time. In fact, I had discovered it when like the rest of the world, I read Scott Peck’s best seller The Road Less Travelled in the 1980s. Robert Frost I knew a little about, having read the biography of his friend Edward Thomas, the English poet who was killed in the Great War and whose story was told by his widow in two of the most moving books I’ve ever read, As It Was and World Without End. But the poem itself was a revelation. Not for the first time, I wondered today what it is that gives it such enduring appeal.

I tweeted my appreciation and voiced my question aloud. Justin Webb replied that it seemed Frost had written it to tease a friend, only to realise its power later (which happens sometimes - we speak beyond what we know or are conscious of, like Caiaphas in St John’s Gospel). That prompted another comment linking to an intriguing article about the poem by David Orr in the Paris Review, The Most Misread Poem in America. He castigates the view, typically American, that it’s ‘a paean to triumphant self-assertion’ and the power of individual agency in gaining mastery over our lives: ‘I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.’ 

No doubt many people have read the poem in that way, though it’s a reading that’s never occurred to me. Maybe I have too much British self-doubt. For me, it’s a highly nuanced reflection on just how contingent our myriad life-choices are, how they hang on fragile threads of opportunity and chance. Every decision we make in life, big or small, could have gone another way. Every fork in the road presents us with a choice. Thousands and thousands of times. And because ‘way leads on to way’, the number of possible routes we could taken through life is almost infinite. Each time, we could have gone along a different track. But we happened to go this way, for whatever reason. Each time, or ‘ages and ages hence’, we had to recognise that it was what it was without regret and without self-justification. The cumulative effect has made us what we are today. That act of acceptance is what’s made ‘all the difference’. 

The poem reads as though it was casually dashed off on the back of an envelope, so artless is it, so unselfconscious. It may have started out that way: I don’t know. However, I have a hunch that in its final form it’s been worked up with great care. Frost’s internal dialogue with himself, the dilemma as to which path has the better claim (not much in it, really), whether he will ever return to this bifurcation (almost certainly not, and in any case he can’t step into the same river twice), what the consequences will be of making this decision rather than that (who can know, yet he has to choose one of them): this all makes acute psychological sense. It’s so well observed, rings true to the choices we have to make where the criteria are finely balanced, sometimes impossibly so, where either decision would make sense, be honourable and have integrity. 

As Kierkegaard famously said, ‘life must be lived forwards and understood backwards’. It’s only with hindsight that we can begin to see (if we ever can) the consequences of the choices we made, conjecture what our other lives might have been like if those decisions had been different. I think this becomes increasingly important as we grow older and are able to reflect on our life’s story and its possible meanings. As I’ve recently reached seventy, this is a key matter for me, not to indulge in regrets, still less self-defence, but to cultivate thankfulness for all that’s been life-giving and good.

It made me wonder whether this was an old man’s poem. The ‘yellow wood’ and fallen leaves suggest an autumnal take on life, the ‘ages and ages hence’ hinting at some kind of eternal perspective. I found out that in fact Robert Frost wrote it in 1916, almost exactly half way through his life. This image of a mid-life traveller brought to a halt in a wood because he doesn’t know which way to go immediately recalls the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy. There, the pilgrim’s journey comes to involve a panoramic perspective on hell, purgatory and heaven, and - for surely this is the spiritual point of the work - a reorientation of his life in the light of what he has been shown. It’s fanciful to think that Frost was recapitulating in twenty lines Dante’s epic voyage, and yet the themes seem to resonate, at least to me. 

Jenny and I have been watching the new drama Devs that’s recently been shown on BBC2. Alex Garland has created a smart, intelligent story about the flow of time in a quantum universe. I don’t pretend to understand it all. But a central theme is the age-old dilemma of determinism-through-causality versus the freedom of the will. Are events, including our own decisions and actions, predestined through processes of causation which, could they be mapped, understood and analysed, would turn out to lead to inevitable outcomes? Does this mean that in principle the future is as fixed as the past and can therefore be predicted? And what about the possibility of other universes diverging from our own in which different choices are acted out and different stories told? 

‘The Road Not Taken’ doesn’t engage with these questions. But it seems to point to the paradox that whatever the metaphysics, our subjective experience is that the choices we make are real and that they matter precisely because they could have gone another way. Its relativistic world view (either path has its own validity as a frame of reference; neither ultimately has the ‘better claim’) seems to echo Einsteinian relativity theory that was taking definitive shape at the time it was written, just as the uncertain choice that faces the traveller reflects the parallel development of quantum theory. It’s very much a poem of the twentieth century, a poem for all of us who can feel overwhelmed by the complexity of the world in which we live and have to trace a path safely through its tangled ‘undergrowth’. But it’s also a deeply life-affirming poem that celebrates our participation in the adventure of living, the reality that is ‘now’. 

So as I read the poem, I’m prompted to pay renewed attention to the ‘sacrament of the present moment’. It’s both the place I inhabit (‘Where can we live but days?’ asks Philip Larkin) and the locus of every decision I make, big or small, of little consequence or of momentous import. Faith affirms that however alone we may seem to be in the face of the choices we make, there is nevertheless a deep magic, a Presence, a Spirit, a Providence that moves in mysterious ways through the changes and chances of this fleeting world. That’s not a metaphysical statement but a faith-based one that rests on the conviction that God is always with us. It may be wishful thinking to read that assumption back into Frost’s poem. Yet its heart speaks to mine in a way that’s reassuring. It may not strictly qualify as ‘religious poetry’. But I experience it that way. 

This is important when we try to ‘ understand life backwards’.  When we construct the story of our lives, we should look for hints of golden thread we can discern that makes connections and traces meaning and value in them. To do this ‘heart-work’ may be especially significant at times like these when we are learning that the days where we live will run out sooner or later. I’d like to think that when that time comes, I shall (God willing) be able to say, ‘For all that has been, thanks! To all that shall be, yes!’ 

And that will make ‘all the difference’. 

Mary: an Advent Meditation

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

I had to study that poem at school. It was my first introduction to any great twentieth century poet. I've never forgotten it. Auden takes Breughel's painting The Fall of Icarus as an example: the ploughman carries on ploughing, and the ship that has somewhere to get to sails calmly on; and all this while a boy falls catastrophically out of the sky. Disaster strikes: someone you love dies, or you are diagnosed as being terminally ill, or your marriage breaks up, or you lose your job. And you wonder how, just outside your universe that is disintegrating, another, ordinary world just carries on uncaring, oblivious.

But about ecstasy the artists and poets are never wrong either, and it is the same truth. You are in the seventh heaven, surprised by joy: you fall in love, or find a new friendship, or have a child, or meet God. And not far away, the rest of the human race is not aware of you, still less cares about what for you is making creation sing. It is as if in both agony and ecstasy, time is attenuated, given a new quality, seems to stand still. Einstein's theory of relativity talks about dilation when space-time is distorted close to the speed of light. It takes on a new quality. But everybody else's "ordinary" time just carries on as it always has. In a sense, it's as if we are living in different worlds until the ecstasy subsides or the agony begins to be healed, and the extraordinary merges with the ordinary once more.

Paintings and sculptures of the Annunciation often depict this double world. Inside her house, the Virgin Mary is rapt in contemplation, heaven reflected in her face as she is overwhelmed by the power of the Most High that has come from beyond the farthest star to visit her. On the other side of the window sheep are grazing, people buy and sell in the streets of a town, a farmer gathers his harvest. Something of this is what I see hinted at in Josef Pyrz' sculpture of the Annunciation in Durham Cathedral's Galilee Chapel. Rapture, toughness, acceptance, pain even are written into her face and body in a physical, tactile way. I used to encourage visitors to caress the sculpture to gain a sense of the complex emotional and spiritual power of this marvellous piece.

 

Edwin Muir captures it like this:

Outside the window footsteps fall

Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

But through the endless afternoon

These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.

Beauty and tragedy are the soil in which contemplatives are made. Mary knew both: beauty her encounter with the angel of the Annunciation; tragedy in the sword that pierced her heart as she gazed on her Son at Golgotha. But it needed more than beauty or tragedy to make her the one we honour as Theotokos the God-bearer. Many people experience beauty and tragedy but are none the wiser for it. Their souls are not enriched, their capacity for contemplation is not deepened. What then was Mary's secret?

I think it was her gift for openness to the new thing that God was doing. Words like sensitivity and awareness come to mind, the gift of realising that the world is, as they say on Lindisfarne, a thin place, and that on the other side of that almost transparent membrane lies another realm, the realm of the spiritual, the heavenly, the transcendent. You see into the life of things, to quote Wordsworth. It is what Moses turned aside to see in the blazing bush and what Elijah heard in the still small voice, and what Mother Julian of Norwich understood in the hazel-nut she held in her hand that, she said, only existed because God loved it. And what the mystics down the centuries teach us is that ordinary life can become transparent, if we learn to see it in a new way, train our faculties of sensitivity and awareness in order to discover the world as a sacrament. After all, that is precisely what we do each Sunday at the eucharist, when we take ordinary things and find them to be divine. Lesser annunciations, you might say, are waiting to happen all around us, waiting to show us the new thing that God wants to do in our lives.  
 

And what about us? God wants us, I think, to become like Mary: each of us a  theotokos, a bearer of God to others. Outside Salisbury Cathedral is a statue of Mary by Elizabeth Frink. It depicts her walking vigorously away from the Cathedral, not because she doesn't like the worship there, but because she is taking the good news to the world. This is the Walking Madonna, the Mary of the Magnificat whose contemplative vision has turned her into a woman of action who is passionate for justice, for a world where wrong is righted, the hungry fed and the downtrodden exalted.

Whatever annunciations we are given, whatever angel we glimpse when time stands still, whether it is tragedy or joyous rapture, agony or ecstasy, there is call to be obeyed. Behold the servant of the Lord: let it be to me according to thy word. So that when the time comes for the angel to depart from us, and we return to our ordinary days, it will be with God conceived, so to speak, within us, so that we can lovingly bear him and bring him forth to a world that longs to be happy and that needs him so much.

Ave Maria, gratia plena
Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you, and blessed is the fruit of your womb Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.