Like a lot of Robert Frost poems, “The Road Not Taken” seems to have lost some of its nuance in the popular imagination. I think I was taught that it is a bold statement about the importance of individuality in a world that so often rewards conformity. That interpretation has become so generally accepted that you can easily imagine Thomas Kincade’s visual rendering of the poem being projected onto a screen at a concert where Lee Greenwood introduces his new musical setting of it. Somewhere in the audience, Stone Cold Steve Austin yells out “Hell yeah, brother!”
Robert Frost was 42 when he published “The Road Not Taken”, on top of which, he seems like the type of person who would have been called an “old soul” as a child. Those lovely woods in “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening” are dark and deep for a reason: you never come back out of them. The last stanza of TRNT admits that he will likely be recalling that untrod road “with a sigh” when he remembers it later on. The only thing notable, it seems, about the road he has taken is that he did, in fact, take it. 42 is old enough to realize that things often don’t work out “better” or “worse”; they just work out differently.
Ordinary Time, this liturgical season that we are in, stretches out from the latter part of spring until the latter part of fall.1 I have often thought about it as the time when we practice gratitude for common things and settle into the rhythms of everyday life. Truth be told, however, this is when a lot of the implications of choosing a road get played out. Families move in the summer so the kids have a chance to get settled before school starts. We’ll see if that split-level with the old oak in the backyard was really a bargain or is it going to need more work than we imagined? We meet the new boss who might, in fact, be the same as the old boss.
Making this kind of change might be particularly American. With the possible exception of Russia (where one might go into the great expanse of Siberia) there seem to be few parts of the world that promise the kind of tabula rasa like the West. Robert Penn Warren may have summed it up best in All The King’s Men:
For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that there’s gold in them-there hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.
The West is where I have gone in this Ordinary Time. Maybe I saw the blade in my hand, or maybe it is just where I have gone. Being called to somewhere and for something is a real thing, and I think it is happening to me, but I’m not sure that makes the other road inferior to this one. It’s just different.
Perhaps part of latter stage Ordinary Time is anticipating the fall. Things are going to start pulling inward: trees, bears, and amphibians. Geese will be choosing which route to follow south, but choosing time is now over for people. Robert Frost sighs while we take another stride into this particular narrative and the imagined possibilities of the alternative are mulched under our feet. It might not have been fated to be this way, but this is how it is.
- Yes, I know, there are some bits of winter that also count, but if you are picky about this then you also probably call that season “Epiphany” rather than “The Season after Epiphany” as it rightly should be called, so sod off. ↩︎