All the Difference

One way to ruin a good poem for ever for someone is to plonk it in front of them in an exam and make them answer lots of pretentious questions about it.

That's what they did to me, in my Finals at University, when dinosaurs ruled the earth and jeans flared out to the horizon.

American Literature was what I'd been studying, and they gave me this. It's The Road Not Taken by the American poet Robert Frost .

In those days it wasn't perhaps so well-known as it is now but I'd read it as part of my course and I always liked it, even though they chose to torment me with it in one of the exams.

I've mercifully blotted out whatever they asked me about that day, but here's some dozy exam question that I found about it on t'interclacker:

This poem is usually interpreted as an assertion of individualism, but critic Lawrence Thompson has argued that it is a slightly mocking satire on a perennially hesitant walking partner of Frost's who always wondered what would have happened if he had chosen their path differently.

What evidence can you find in the poem to support each of these views?

What evidence can you find in the question to support my ever-growing theory that answering questions like this might stop you reading poetry forever?

Anyway, last night, thinking about why people like some people and not others, and why people become friends, I thought of this poem, and found I can apply it in some way or another to all the people whom I like. And I've really struggled to find a way to phrase that last sentence which doesn't sound totally pretentious. And if it does sound totally pretentious, I want you to know that I tried, honest. Enough! Here's the poem.

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

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I
I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference.