The road less traveled...NOT!
Did you ever find out that something you learned a long time ago turned out to be not just wrong, but completely wrong -- the exact opposite of what you've always believed?
I was leafing through a book with the rather pompous title "The Intellectual Devotional'' and a cover blurb, which read "365 Daily Lessons From The Seven Fields of Knowledge." (Who knew there were only seven?)
One of those lessons turned out to be an analysis of the Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken,'' the one that ends with "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -/I took the road less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.''
This always seemed to be a kind of credo for the individualist, rugged or not, who goes his or her own way, and not with the crowd. All of that may be true, but it is not what Frost was saying.
The authors point out that a close reading of the poem shows the last stanza to be a knowing lie on the poet of that poem's narrator.
In fact, in the first three stanzas, we're told that the two roads are nearly identical, not a dime's worth of difference between them in the well-traveled department, and the choice of which one to take really came down to a mental coin flip.
The last verse is hooey, a fib that the narrator says he'll tell in the years to come to make it seem as if his life turned out the way it did through a series of conscious, courageous decisions. In fact, his life, like all our lives, is determined by random choice and chance.
It really is all in the poem, but I never saw it and was never taught it the right way.
I haven't been this embarassed since I found that Robert Plant was singin "got to get you movin' now'' in that old Led Zeppelin song when for years I thought he scatting: "mon-eh-nom-e-noom-e-nah.''
I was leafing through a book with the rather pompous title "The Intellectual Devotional'' and a cover blurb, which read "365 Daily Lessons From The Seven Fields of Knowledge." (Who knew there were only seven?)
One of those lessons turned out to be an analysis of the Robert Frost poem "The Road Not Taken,'' the one that ends with "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -/I took the road less traveled by/And that has made all the difference.''
This always seemed to be a kind of credo for the individualist, rugged or not, who goes his or her own way, and not with the crowd. All of that may be true, but it is not what Frost was saying.
The authors point out that a close reading of the poem shows the last stanza to be a knowing lie on the poet of that poem's narrator.
In fact, in the first three stanzas, we're told that the two roads are nearly identical, not a dime's worth of difference between them in the well-traveled department, and the choice of which one to take really came down to a mental coin flip.
The last verse is hooey, a fib that the narrator says he'll tell in the years to come to make it seem as if his life turned out the way it did through a series of conscious, courageous decisions. In fact, his life, like all our lives, is determined by random choice and chance.
It really is all in the poem, but I never saw it and was never taught it the right way.
I haven't been this embarassed since I found that Robert Plant was singin "got to get you movin' now'' in that old Led Zeppelin song when for years I thought he scatting: "mon-eh-nom-e-noom-e-nah.''
posted by Michael Riley at 4:36 AM
2 Comments:
and naive me thought the song "Ride the Pony" was literal about a pony...until I found out it is hardcore something else..
MR:
"In fact, his life, like all our lives, is determined by random choice and chance."
Ah, randomness. That much-misunderstood idea that causes so much confusion. So many people shun the idea because it makes them uncomfortable yet it's a major part of life, like it or not. Think about how different one's life would be if you hadn't missed that traffic light or registered late for a class where you met your spouse. But we'd rather believe that things are predetermined and preordained. It's much tidier that way.
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