[CobrastanJorji]

I like this and think it reads true. Asides from the content, I also like the writing style and wish more pieces were similarly succinct and not weighted down with unnecessary pages of text before getting to the point.

That said, ending the piece with an allusion to "The Road Not Taken," a poem about how meaningless decisions make you incorrectly feel like you're in control, is an odd choice.

[codetrotter]

> ending the piece with an allusion to "The Road Not Taken," a poem about how meaningless decisions make you incorrectly feel like you're in control, is an odd choice.

I remember liking this poem but I never knew about this interpretation of it.

I looked it up on Wikipedia and Wikipedia agrees with you, kind of.

> It is a frequently misunderstood poem, often read simply as a poem that champions the idea of "following your own path," but rather it expresses some irony regarding such an idea.

> [...]

> According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost's biographer, as Frost was once about to read the poem, he commented to his audience, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem—very tricky," perhaps intending to suggest the poem's ironic possibilities.

> Thompson suggests that the poem's narrator is "one who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice made: belatedly but wistfully he sighs over the attractive alternative rejected." Thompson also says that when introducing the poem in readings, Frost would say that the speaker was based on his friend Edward Thomas. In Frost's words, Thomas was "a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken

[ethangk]

Thanks! And I read The Road Not Taken years ago when I was considering leaving San Francisco and it turns out I'd taken the completely wrong message away from it. Thanks for pointing that out

[CobrastanJorji]

Everyone does. That's what's amazing about the poem. On a first read, it's a life-changing message about positivity so strong that it's endlessly requoted worldwide. Do you know how hard it is to write a poem that good? There are perhaps not even 100 of them in all of history.

And yet on a second or third or tenth reading, you start to realize that he was also writing a much more cynical poem with the opposite message. I can't even imagine how hard it is to wrap a meaning like that into the first kind of poem.

Robert Frost is frickin' amazing.