I’m in the mood for poetry today 🙂 Think poetry is a great hobby to cultivate if you’re somewhat lazy, or short of time, or the kind who’s always looking for shortcuts!! 😉
Seriously, a short poem can provide you with the same wisdom and insights that many pages of an essay or a book can. This very famous poem “The Road Not Taken” by American poet Robert Frost is one of them. It’s a truly great poem because it has a simple meaning as well as a higher symbolic one regarding taking risks and decision-making.
The poet describes how a traveler comes across a fork in his path and has to decide which of the two roads to choose. He takes a long time considering both but decides to choose the one that is more grassy and less worn out, because he believes that it looks equally good.
He also describes his hesitation and uncertainty regarding the decision by saying that maybe some other day, he might come back and try the other road – “I kept the first for another day!” But, he becomes realistic and goes on to write “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” The last paragraph is the best – do read the poem……….
The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost
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.