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Walk the less trodden path

Posted by ESC on May 20, 2004

In Reply to: Walk the less trodden path posted by SR on May 20, 2004

: : Hello,

: : what is the meaning of walking the less trodden path?

: Robert Frost wrote one of my favourite poems about this...
: : 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.

According to one analysis "The inspiration for it (The Road Not Taken) came from Frost's amusement over a familiar mannerism of his closest friend in England, Edward Thomas. While living in Gloucestershire in 1914, Frost frequently took long walks with Thomas through the countryside. Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better" direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. Disciplined by the austere biblical notion that a man, having put his hand to the plow, should not look back, Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been."