The poems do talk but do they speak too? And can a poem speak to you?There is a difference between talking and speaking. Speaking is formal and focussed. Talking is longer and more comprehensive. And when some one speaks to you, you are the centre of activity, in a talk, the one talking steals the focus.
Poems may not be written to address an individual but the individual may receive the poem as if it were addressed to him.
A poem can, therefore, speak to you.
What kind of a poem can speak to you? Perhaps any kind! It will depend on the intensity with which it assails you. It will also depend on one’s own sensitivities and emotional constitution. The circumstances under which a poem is read will also play a role as will be one’s age and one’s station in life. Therefore, a large variety of poems can touch one’s heart and agitate one’s thinking. Yet, many poems are capable of appealing a large cross-section of people.
A poem owes its impact and influence to many factors. While the content of the poem plays a key role, its language, its style; and its rhythm and musicality also contribute in creating a spell on the reader.
A number of poems have deeply impacted me and made me ponder for long. But the one that stands our is ‘The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. It is a short poem and deserves to be reproduced below:-
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 deem this poem to be among the best-known, most-often-misunderstood poems on the planet. Several generations of careless readers have turned it into just a piece of a bold moral choice, when it is far more. Cursed with a perfect marriage of form and content, arresting phrase wrought from simple words, and resonant metaphor, it seems as if “The Road Not Taken” gets memorized without really being read.
One of the attractions of the poem is its archetypal dilemma, one that we instantly recognize because each of us encounters it innumerable times, both literally and figuratively. Paths in the woods and forks in roads are ancient and deep-seated metaphors for the lifeline, its crises and decisions. Identical forks, in particular, symbolize for us the nexus of free will and fate: We are free to choose, but we do not really know beforehand what we are choosing between. Our route is, thus, determined by an accretion of choice and chance, and it is impossible to separate the two.
This poem does not advise. It does not say, “When you come to a fork in the road, study the footprints and take the road less traveled by”. Frost’s focus is more complicated. First, there is no less-traveled road in this poem; it isn’t even an option. Next, the poem seems more concerned with the question of how the concrete present (yellow woods, grassy roads covered in fallen leaves) will look from a future vantage point.
Ironically, this is also a poem infused with the anticipation of remorse. Its title is not “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.” Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if does not want to stand forever in the woods, one for which he has no real guide or definitive basis for decision-making), the speaker knows that he will surely reflect somewhere down the line—or at the very least he will wonder at what is irrevocably lost: the impossible, unknowable Other Path.
In our lives also, often there is no right path, wither the chosen path, or the other path. There will always be a sigh, down our lives, a sigh not so much for choosing a path but the anticipated remorse of not knowing what the other path would have unfolded.
“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost speaks to me because of its powerful messages about the power of choice, the importance of taking risks, and the power of reflection. It celebrates the decision of the moment but does not overlook the frustrations of an alternative choice.
And therein lies the power and force with which it seizes my mind.
scribo ad LX 