Frost found Thomas to be an indecisive man, and after he’d written ‘The Road Not Taken’ but before it was published, he sent it to Thomas, whose indecisiveness even extended to uncertainty over whether to follow Frost to the United States or to enlist in the army and go and fight in France. What is also less well-known than it should be about ‘The Road Not Taken’ is the fact that the poem may have begun life as Frost’s gentle ribbing of his friend, the English poet Edward Thomas, with whom Frost had taken many walks during the pre-WWI years when Frost had been living in England. But Frost’s final lines are also about how taking one course means that we didn’t take another course, and that may make all the difference, and not always for the better. ‘I kidded myself that one of the roads was less well-trodden and so, to be different from the mainstream, that’s the one I took, brave and independent risk-taker and road-taker that I am.’ This isn’t true, but it’s the sort of self-myth-making we often go in for. The poem’s famous final lines are less a proud assertion of individualism than a bittersweet example of the way we always rewrite our own histories to justify the decisions we make. Should I take this job or not take this job? In titling his poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ and making the choice between two roads that diverged in a wood, Frost imparts a much greater meaning to his poem, since it represents all such ‘do X or don’t do X’ choices we face in our lives. Published in 1916, The Road Not Taken is Robert Frost’s most well-known poem, and perhaps one of the most well-known poems of all time. The speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Robert Frost (1874-1963) was an American poet whose poems often depict rural scenes from the New England countryside. Should I marry this person or not marry them? Those are, baldly speaking, the only two choices, even if not marrying X leads to our marrying Y. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood Summary. We regret not doing things all the time.īut many decisions only allow us an either/or option. When choosing one path over another, do we ever regret our choice? We often wonder about the choices we didn’t make, the chances we didn’t take. Frost’s poem foregrounds that it is the road he didn’t take which is the real subject of the poem. The poem is titled ‘The Road Not Taken’, not ‘The Road Less Travelled’. If you doubt that the show’s writers intended that subtext, consider Piper’s comment that the speaker of the poem is telling his story “at a dinner party.” Orange Is the New Black is very conscious of its main character’s degree of privilege-and the writers are clever enough to poke fun of it even when Piper is in the middle of being right about something (such as, for instance, a Robert Frost poem).If we go back to the title of Frost’s poem, we can see that that title gives us a hint that this is the intended meaning. Her less affluent fellow inmates, whose choices frequently have grave and irreparable consequences, don’t have the luxury of such fatalism. It’s easy for her to say that, “in reality, shit just happens the way that it happens,” and that people’s choices don’t really matter. She’s serving one year in prison, after which she’ll have a number of choices to make about her future. Piper is unusual among the prisoners in Orange Is the New Black in that she comes from a well-heeled family and has a fancy college education. That terrifying commercial brings me back to why Tricia is right to be annoyed by Piper and her lecture.
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