Jackie Lay, “America’s Most Widely Misread Literary Work,” The Atlantic, March 19, 2018, read online.ĭavid Orr, “The Most Misread Poem in America,” The Paris Review, September 11, 2015, read online. But with each one, right or wrong, God meets us anew, and begins the next leg of the journey with us. In the meantime, yes, our choices make all the difference. Since providence is a doctrine best seen in retrospect, it will undoubtedly only be when our lives are complete and fully with God that we will see how each divergent road could have led. Just different.Īnd this is the great spiritual dynamic of the choices God allows us to make and how each choice leads us down ever-divergent paths from where we began. But that does not mean our choice was better or worse than another. Yes, the one we choose – as with the road in Frost’s poem – makes all the difference. There could be any number of people we could fall in love with and spend the rest of our lives with in marriage, all equally in receipt of God’s blessing. The deeper truth is that we are called to be equally yoked spiritually – meaning to marry a fellow Christ-follower – but beyond that, the choice is ours to make. Consider marriage: It is a spiritual myth that there is one and only one “Mr./Ms. So when we read the final stanza, “we can’t know whether the speaker is sighing with contentedness or regret as he justifies the choices he’s made and shapes the narrative of his life.” Frost actually wrote the poem to tease an indecisive friend, Edward Thomas, “who misinterpreted the meaning and enlisted in the military shortly thereafter, only to be killed two years later in WWI.”īut the poem can also be misread spiritually in light of the mystery and wonder of God’s will working in tandem with our own. It’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.” The critic David Orr even called it “the most misread poem in America.” Writing in The Paris Review, Orr notes: “This is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices… The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism. He once said, “You have to be careful of that one it’s a tricky poem-very tricky.” In truth, the two roads are “really about the same.” In other words, they are equally traveled and quite interchangeable. As Jackie Lay writes in The Atlantic, which first published the poem in 1915, we often interpret it as an “anthem of individualism and nonconformity.” In other words, an encouragement to take the road less traveled.īut, according to Robert Frost himself, this was not the intent. David Orr, The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong 1 likes Like It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itselfthat instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.
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