Sermon: Which is it to Be?

Do you all know the Robert Frost poem, “The Road Not Taken”? In it, Frost describes making a choice:

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;

A number of different thoughts occur to him: he compares the two paths – how they look from where he’s standing. Perhaps he can choose one and then come back to the other another day. How will he feel in the future about it?

The poem concludes:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The problem with analyzing poetry is that what the poet is saying is sometimes less simple and clear-cut than we might make it out to be. In fact, I remember having this conversation with Alice Tarr. Now, she was talking about it in the context of teaching GED classes where students were asked to identify “the theme’ of a poem. Alice objected to practice because – and I quote – “If it could be said more simply, the poet would have said it that way.”

Nonetheless, this poem is meaningful to a great many people. I think that springs from the fact that we all make choices. We make them every day. Some of them are small; some are large. Many times we don’t know the significance of a choice when we make it. But as a rule, we can identify with the thoughts Frost shares here.