The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

“A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness.”
– Robert Frost

On August 1st, Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken had 100 birthdays. How many moments of joy multiplied have we enjoyed from “a homesickness, a lovesickness”?

I just returned from our own long cross country trip, and as my family camped out in a myriad of places across America, I kept thinking about our choices in life, about our “roads not taken”, or the paths that we have chosen instead.

So this trip reminded me that there is much to learn, always, in everything we do, in every journey, metaphorical or physical, intellectual or emotional. But the most important thing I have learned is that in every little change, we find ourselves evolving.

If we flow with these changes, these alterations — just like the “lump in the throat” — it can become beauty, and thus, we can grow and transform into that diamond in the rough, that road “less traveled by, And that has made all the difference”!

Robert Frost’s Poem:

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.