Irrational Choices Exposed in Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken Essay

Irrational Choices Exposed in The Road Not taken     Self-reliance in The Road Not Taken is alluringly embodied as the outcome of a story presumably representative of all stories of self-hood, and whose interchange episode is that moment of the turning-point conclusiveness, the crisis from which a self springs a critical decision cheeringly, for Frosts American readers, grounded in a rational act when a self, and hence an entire course of life, are autonomously and irreversibly chosen. The particular Fireside poetical structure in which Frost incarnates this myth of selfhood is the analogical adorn poem, possibly most famously executed by William Cullen Bryant in To a Waterfowl, a poem that Matthew Arnold praised as the finest lyric of the nineteenth century and that Frost had by heart as a child thanks to his mothers enthusiasm.   The analogical landscape poem draws its force from the culturally ancient and pervasive idea of spirit as allegorical book, in its A merican poetic setting a book out of which to draw explicit lessons for the conduct of life (nature as self-help text). In its classic Fireside expression, the details of landscape and all inwrought events are cagily set up for moral summary as they are marched up to the poems conclusion, like little imagistic lambs to slaughter, for their payoff in lift up message. Frost appears to recapitulate the tradition in his sketching of the yellow wood and the two roads and in his channeling of the poems course of events right up to the portentous colon ( approximatelyplace ages and ages hence) beyond which lies the wisdom that we jot down and take position Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --I took the unity less traveled by,And that has made all the di... ...lly understood to endorse -- predicts, in other words, what the poem will be sentimentally made into, and from a place in the poem that its Atlantic Monthly reading, as it were, will never touch. The power of the last stanza within the Fireside teleology of analogical landscape assures Frost his popular audience, while for those who get his game -- some member, say, of a different audience, versed in the avant-garde little magazines and in the treacheries of irony and the impulse of the individual talent trying, as Pound urged, to declare it new against the literary and social American grain - for that reader, this poem tells a different tale that our life-shaping choices are irrational, that we are fundamentally out of control. This is the unreal wisdom of Frost, which he hides in a moralizing statement that asserts the consoling contrary of what he knows.