Roads Not Taken: A Study in Poetic Mechanism

Another working paper posted; links, abstract, and introduction as usual.

• Academia.edu: https://www.academia.edu/17120360/Roads_Not_Taken_A_Study_in_Poetic_Mechanism
• SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2677363

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Abstract: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is a ring composition three levels deep: 1 2 Ω 2’ 1’. The central section consists of lines 9 through 12 cuts across the boundary between the second (ll. 6-10) and third (ll. 11-14) stanzas. There is a subtle shift in tense in line 16 in which the poet in effect travels back into the past, at the moment of decision captured in the poem, so that he can anticipate the present moment in which the poem unfolds. Thus the end of the poem rejoins the beginning, not merely through the repetition of a line, but through a trick in time.

CONTENTS

Introduction: Another Ring Discovered 2

Preliminaries: Describing Form, and a Precedent 2

A Road Literary Critics Don’t Travel 3
A Parallel in “Kubla Khan” 3

Frost’s Text: The Road Not Taken 5

Robert Frost, Time Traveler: The Road Not Taken 5

Poetic Mechanism 6
But What About Meaning? 10

Further Thoughts 11

Alignment in “The Road Not Taken” 11
More Frostiness 14
More About the Poem 16

Introduction: Another Ring Discovered

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is one of the best-known poems in the English language and a secondary school favorite in America. It would be a bit much to assert that every schoolchild has read the poem, but many have, for they’ve had no choice. Many critics written about the poem as well and there seems to be widespread agreement that the poem is a bit deceptive, as poems are wont to be.

Still, when, prompted by a post in 3 Quarks Daily, I set out to read it again, long after my schoolboy years, I wasn’t expecting to discover something in the poem that, apparently, other critics have missed. Yes, I know I know, the great texts yield endless riches. But what I discovered was something that was, to me anyhow, obvious, something about the poem’s form. Yes, four stanzas of five lines, rhymed ABAAC – that too is obvious. We learn how to do that kind of description in secondary school.

But that’s about it as far as formal description goes. After that the search for meaning takes over and never lets up. And so most of the discussion of this poem, as of others, is about meaning, and its formal features are either ignored or treated as ornamentation.

What was obvious about this poem, almost as soon as I’d reread it, is that it is a ring-composition, which I explain in detail a bit later. But I shouldn’t have had to discover that. Just as it is commonly known that dogs have four legs and a tail, so I should be commonly known that “The Road Not Taken” is a ring-composition. Once you see that, then you can see how the poem has three structural principles operating in parallel, I write about that as well.

Such a simple poem, such a rich text. So much that’s not been observed.

When WILL we open our eyes and ears?

More Frostiness: 3 passages, 2 from Frost himself

I’d like to backtrack a bit and pick up the thread on Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”. In my original post at 3 Quarks Daily I’d argued that the poem is a ring-composition and that he plays a peculiar game with tense in the last stanza, slipping back into the post without giving us due warning – like you go to sleep nice and comfy in your familiar bed in your familiar bedroom in your familiar home and awaken in your familiar bed in Dr. Who’s freakin’ Tardis in the middle of god knows when and where! In my follow-up here at New Savanna I looked at alignment between sentences, stanzas, and ring-composition units, noting that these three structural streams do not line up, but interact in interesting ways.

Now I want to do something very traditional in literary criticism, take a look at some other things that Frost has said and look a bit into his artistic biography. My source in this is a very interesting recent article: David Wyatt, “Robert Frost and the Work of Retelling”, The Hopkins Review, Volume 8, Number 3, Summer 2015 (New Series), pp. 387-404. Wyatt gives us this most interesting anecdote about young Frost (p. 401):

As early as 1892, in his high school valedictory address, Frost had coined a word for these acts of looking back. He calls them “after-thought.” Borrowing the word from the title of a sonnet by Wordsworth, Frost spoke of life as two-fold: “Not in the strife of action, is the leader made, nor in the face of crisis, but when all is over, when the mind is swift with keen regret, in the long after-thought. The after-thought of one action is the forethought of the next.” In this model of experience there is action and then there is after-thought. 

But what of the poetic act? Frost continues: “The poet’s insight is his after-thought . . . . And the grandest of his ideas come when the last line is written.”

In the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth had famously asserted:

I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till by a species of reaction the tranquility gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind.

Thus poetry is a kind of repetition – a theme that will come to loom large in Western philosophical thought (think Nietzsche and his eternal return, Camus and Sisyphus, for example). So, we have Frost mining this vein while his mind is still blossoming. No longer a child, to be sure, nonetheless another Wordsworthian formula comes to mind: The child is father to the man.

Twenty years later (1912) Frost would write this dream? fantasy? recollection? in a letter to Susan Hayes Ward, an important poetry editor (Wyatt, pp. 402-403):

Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled. Judge then how surprised I was the other evening to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noisless [sic] yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone’s eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home. But I didn’t go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that too, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, could we but have made it out.

This puts us/Frost at the juncture of two roads in the woods. Wyatt observes (p. 403): “Here we can see a poet auditioning for a poem he did not yet know it was in him to write.” Something like that, for sure.

He continues:

Nothing in Frost’s published work is any more uncanny than this imagined meeting in the woods. The pang of “The Road Not Taken” had lodged itself in the phrase “one traveler.” The speaker can only remain one if he gives up the option of traveling both roads, however similar or unlike they may be. In the letter, Frost literalizes these anxieties about the split self. There are also two roads in the letter, and a concern, as in the poem, with the “condition of both.” But the far more compelling divergence is between the two men. It is a classic doppelgänger moment, although one given its own peculiar Frostian slant.

I suppose. Can’t say I agree, or disagree, only that I’ve got nothing better to say myself. The important point is simply that there is an obvious kinship between that passage in the letter to Ward and the poem Frost would write four years later. Just how Frost’s mind made the journey from one to the other, that we don’t know.

Is the poem a repetition of that fantasy in another key? Does that fantasy echo the high school valedictory of twenty years earlier? Is this an example of how the past, through art, continues to live in the present, Wordsworth in Frost and now both of them in us?

Let us give Frost the last word, from his preface to his Collected Poems of Robert Frost (1939), “The Figure a Poem Makes”:

It should be of the pleasure of a poem itself to tell how it can. The figure a poem makes. It begins in delight and ends in wisdom. The figure is the same as for love. No one can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place. It begins in delight, it inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life-not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.

Alignment in “The Road Not Taken”

One of the things that interests me about poetry is alignment, or, perhaps more accurately, (deliberate) misalignment. Thus, while Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” consists of four stanzas of equal length, sentence-end punctuation doesn’t align with stanza divisions. To be sure, the poem does consist of four sentences, but the first one includes the first two stanzas plus the first two lines of the third. The third line of the third stanza is the second sentence, while the last two lines of that stanza constitute the third sentence. The fourth stanza is a sentence unto itself.

This sentence division is not a necessary consequence of the conventions of English punctuation. It is precisely because those conventions are flexible that Frost could have one sentence encompass two stanzas and two lines without raising any hackles. But he could have punctuated the poem differently. It seems to me, for example, that the following would have been a more ‘natural’ way to punctuate those first two stanzas (my changes underlined and highlighted; for reference, see original punctuation 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. 

I put periods at the ends of both stanzas and divided each into two sentences in a ‘natural’ way: Divide the first stanza into two sentences by putting a period after “traveler”. Divide the second in two by putting a period after “wear” at the end of the third line.

The question then arises, why did Frost divide the poem into sentences the way he did? I’m guessing that we don’t really know, nor did he, at least not consciously. I’m not familiar with Frost scholarship, but nothing I’ve read about this poem in the last couple of days says anything that speaks to the issue beyond noting that the final stanza is the first one he wrote. So, it was conceived as a coherent unit and the rest of the poem was crafted to match.

However Frost went about the rest of the poem, I assume, by default, that his punctuation decisions were mostly intuitive. He stretched that first sentence over two-plus stanzas because it felt right. What was triggering that feeling?

Ring-Composition @3QD: “The Road Not Taken”

It’s time for my once-every-four-weeks piece in 3 Quarks Daily. This time it’s a bit of descriptive poetics, about Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” As Frost once wrote in a letter, his poems are “all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless” (I copped that line from Michael Andor Brodeur). This one certainly does.

Frost’s poems are like Dr. Who’s Tardis: It’s this innocent looking blue box around the corner, but when you enter Zoomm!! it’s off for a spin around the universe. If you you work it right, though, you return home, safe and revivified.

My post’s a nice piece of work, if I do say so myself. But also a bit embarrassing, as I seem to have described something in this much-analyzed known poem that other scholars have missed. That’s what I discuss next, going into my standard rant about the need for description of literary form. Then I conclude by pointing out that Frost employed a trick in this poem very much like one Coleridge used a century earlier in “Kubla Kahn” – now there’s a poetic Tardis if ever there was one!

The Road Literary Critics Don’t Travel

There’s nothing special about what I did with Frost’s poem. It’s pretty much straight-up formal description, with a bit of ever so slightly technical linguistics in it. By looking at a little tricky business with tense I show that this poem is – you guessed it – a ring-composition. Another one.

But who cares about such things? Well, some people do, but most literary critics do not. Because, for all that literary critics have nattered on about form, they’re not really interested in it. The discipline became mesmerized by hermeneutics in the middle of the last century and simply tossed poetics over the rail.

This is one of the best-known 20th century American poems. And yet it seems that none of its many critics have grasped this most fundamental aspect of the poem’s form, as though it just doesn’t matter. They’re not paying attention.

It’s rather like an arthropodologist who doesn’t know whether or not centipedes have exactly 100 legs and whether they typically have more legs than millipedes have. Yes, there’s lots of legs propelling those creatures over the face of the earth. Maybe even lots and lots. Exactly 100 or exactly 1000? More, less, a range? But you know I haven’t counted up to 100 since I was ten years old on the school fieldtrip counting all those bottles of beer on the wall. Boring!

Counting the number of legs on an arthropod is not difficult. You do have to know how to count, and you have to be careful, as you don’t want to skip any or double-count any. It’s not rocket science. It’s not deep.

But it’s necessary. And it’s the foundation for the study of morphological variety. If you don’t have a grip on that, you’re never going to understand evolution. Without descriptive control over his materials, Darwin wouldn’t have been able to see the pattern that he explained by evolution.

What patterns are literary critics missing because they don’t want to or don’t know how to analyze and describe the forms of literary texts? We patterns are lost to human understanding, what knowledge, because the stewards of these texts don’t describe them?