[read me]
(a combination of childish mis-comprehension and an adult stubbornness)… it’s just that I’ve had this poem memorized for what feels like most of my life (so it pops up in my head repeatedly, annoyingly) and i’ve never liked it
1. “a yellow wood” — It sounds ugly to me.
2. “just as fair” and “the passing there/Had worn them really about the same” and both “equally lay/ in leaves no step had trodden black” — It doesn’t sound like one is really less traveled, now does it?
3. “I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference.” — A little preemptively arrogant, don’t you think?
[I only last year realized that the title could refer to either road. I always thought it meant the road he did take, since that one was not taken by (supposedly, though I think questionably) most other people, but I’ve come to realize it could refer to the other road — the one he, the poet, did not take — which actually makes more sense, and kind of makes me hate the poem a little less: In my new reading now, along with the fore-arrogance, there’s a hint of fore-nostalgia. What would his life had been if he took the other road that morning? (Well, “really about the same,” but who’s keeping score?)]
actually, i have never liked it either. i’ve had it memorized most of my life too (it won’t go away for some reason), and honestly, i only ever refer to it rolling my eyes and saying whatever line from it in an over exaggerated reading voice.
UGH.