[Jane Hirshfield](http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19013) upon hearing the news about the vandalism of Robert Frost's cabin in the woods, and the [unusual sentence given the vandals](http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/02/frost.house.ap/index.html), posted the poem in question. I think it's past copyright now, so I repost it here.


The Road Not Taken


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,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I.

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.




I haven't read it since high-school, and I read it entirely differently now than I did then. For me, back in high school about being different, choosing "The road less traveled"

Re-reading it now, it seems almost wistful. The subject of the poem is reflecting on the one choice, that seemed almost inconsequential at the time. At the time, he thought " Oh, I kept the first for another day!" Then in the very next line he says " Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back."

We all make potentially life-altering choices each day, and each one, no matter how minor it seems at the time, can have drastic effects on not only your life, but the lives of all the people you effect.

The final lines of the poem I read entirely differently now, with the first line of the final stanza setting an entirely different tone.



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Published

06 June 2008