Additionally, at the time, Britain was advocating for “pal battalions,” which meant that the people who you grew up with, laughed with, played football with, gone fishing with, and shot guns with, would be guaranteed to be grouped together, and to fight and die together in the front lines. On top of all this, the incident took place while World War I was being fought, and all of Thomas’ friends had gone to war.
Like any other sensible human being, Thomas engaged in a tactical retreat, but Frost firmly stood his ground yet again, like the Statue of Liberty standing against the dark depths of oppression.Īfter this harrowing experience for Thomas, he was deeply ashamed of having acted like a coward. The gamekeeper was probably mauled by Frost’s powerfully poetic voice, which prompted him to hide behind his shotgun again, but was too scared to point it at the fearsome Frost, so he directed it towards Thomas. Frost banged on the door, verbally assaulting the gamekeeper upon the door’s opening.
#Frost road not taken professional#
Frost, in true American fashion, bunched up his fists like a professional boxer and was fully prepared to start brawling with whacks and thwacks in a gun fight but ceased when he noticed Thomas hurrying away before the situation could escalate.Īfterwards, with Frost in the lead, the two friends marched to the gamekeeper’s house. On one particular walk, the pair were impeded by an aggressive gamekeeper wielding a shotgun. As Frost once said, Thomas was “a person, who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other.” During these walks, the friends would choose a path at random to venture down, and being the person that he was, Thomas would be constantly regretful of the paths that they missed out on and often blamed himself for not finding any particularly interesting birds (this strange obsession will be explained later). Like any other best friends in the roaring 20’s, Frost and Thomas took frequent nature walks, where they would admire the beautiful English landscape and try to identify interesting birds and other fauna and flora. Hold on, I hear you questioning, wasn’t Frost an American poet? So how did he have an English bloke as his best friend? Well, Frost began his journey as a poet while he was living in England, and returned to America shortly after the first World War. The story behind that friendship sheds an entirely new light on this poem. However, a little research reveals that Frost dedicated this poem to Edward Thomas, who happened to be his best friend and to have also been a poet and an Englishman.
If a little bit of a metaphorical magic is mixed in, it then becomes about the choice the poet has made to make a unique decision, over a choice that the majority of people would have made, in an important moment on his journey of life. Put simply, it’s about the poet’s choice to take the less-worn road over a well-worn one, on a trip that he’s taking. Without any further research and on the initial reading, this poem doesn’t seem particularly sophisticated. Many people are oblivious to the fascinating history behind this famous piece, involving the tale of two best friends that ultimately ends in one friend indirectly killing the other through this poem. If you’re one of the legions of high school students who have read Robert Frost’s classic poem, “The Road Not Taken,” you probably view it simply as a philosophical poem about making difficult decisions.
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