One forest has replaced another, just as-in the poem-one choice will supplant another. An inveterate New England farmer and woodsman, Robert Frost would have known these woods were “new”-full of trees that had grown after older ones had been decimated. Both birches and alders are “pioneer species,” the first trees to come back after the land has been stripped bare by logging or forest fires. The leaves of both turn bright yellow in fall, distinguishing them from maple leaves, which flare red and orange. The yellow leaves suggest that the poem is set in autumn, perhaps in a section of woods filled mostly with alder or birch trees. Defining the wood with one feature prefigures one of the essential ideas of the poem: the insistence that a single decision can transform a life. In his description of the trees, Frost uses one detail-the yellow leaves-and makes it emblematic of the entire forest. Out walking, the speaker comes to a fork in the road and has to decide which path to follow: Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, “The Road Not Taken” begins with a dilemma, as many fairytales do. … Mea culpa.” However, Frost liked to quip, “I’m never more serious than when joking.” As his joke unfolds, Frost creates a multiplicity of meanings, never quite allowing one to supplant the other-even as “The Road Not Taken” describes how choice is inevitable. Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been “taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. When they went walking together, Thomas was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and-in retrospect-often lamented that they should, in fact, have taken the other one. Robert Frost wrote “ The Road Not Taken” as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas. This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Deconstructive criticism by jmwahlstrom. If taking the “road less traveled” is supposed to make us stand out then why in reality should it give us so much anxiety and feelings of regret? Other words that contribute to the overall binary opposition are stood, bent, sigh, hence and different all accumulate a great deal of meanings that ultimately become a chain of signifiers.įilled with double meaning and ambiguity, the Frost poem that I once took so lightheartedly leaves me with a sense of wonderment and a little confusion. Looking at difference helps us define something by what it is not. Difference could mean a disagreement or a state of being dissimilar. Another word that really stands out is the last word in the poem, difference. Diverged is a word used twice in this poem, the definition can mean: to differ in opinion, move into different directions, it is even used as a mathematical term. So how can we see this? Lets look for example some of the words that have multiple meanings. In short the narrator wished to take the road less traveled but he was conflicted with the repercussions of his ultimate decision. Now that we see the universal interpretation of the poem lets look at it in a deconstructive context.Īfter rereading this poem a couple of times I found that the underling ideology of the text was the narrator’s inability to be assured in his decisions showing evident doubt and insecurity among voluminous decisions. The only real way to live life is to take risks and not to worry so much about the end result. Its like my mom always says, “Well if all your friends jump off a bridge are you going to too?” Again we grow up in a society where if you conform to the “norm” then you aren’t so special, you’re just an everyday Joe. Its main theme transpires the idea that taking a leap of faith and not always taking the path that others take (nonconformity) is the thing to do. Many times this poem is interpreted and celebrated as a happy go lucky, go get ‘um tiger type of way. How I analyzed this poem then does not in any way, shape, or form mirror how I see it now. I remember doing an English paper trying to analyze this poem in high school. I chose to look at Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” for my deconstructive analysis. Tyson’s line about the way in which deconstructionist view language was one of the many things that stuck out to me while reading this chapter “language is not the reliable tool of communication we believe it to be, but rather a fluid, ambiguous domain of complex experience in which ideologies program us without our being aware of them.” I think this is helpful to keep in mind while deconstructing any piece of literature.
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