The Road Not Taken and Other Poems

I found this collection a mixed bag. This curated collection emphasizes Frost’s poetry about nature, farming, and the rural life. The editor takes poems from three of Frost’s prominent works of poetry that are spread across the whole of his life. The final portion, which many would find more familiar, is pulled from the volume that included his famous poem “The Road Not Taken.”

“North of Boston” is also included here, with selections of his narrative poetry. I did not find this as appealing...perhaps because some of them are written in Frost’s characteristic vague and obfuscating style that hides much of the intended meaning from the reader. But, there were numerous gems included here with profound insights into human nature. As an example, one of my favorite stanzas comes from one of his earliest poems, “Revelation:”

“We make ourselves a place apart
Behind light words that tease and flout,
But oh, the agitated heart
Till someone find us really out.”

Here is Frost at his most profound. We all craft a pleasant facade that we present to the world, making “ourselves a place apart” and beyond the ability of casual observers to figure out. But behind this veneer lies the anxiety of someone finding “us really out.” Are we acceptable in our true nature, beyond this glimmer of “light words that tease and flout?”

Or, as another example, this from “The Trial by Existence,”

“‘Tis of the essence of life here,
Though we choose greatly, still to lack
The lasting memory at all clear,
That life has for us on the wrack
Nothing but what we somehow chose;
Thus we are wholly stripped of pride
In the pain that has but one close,
Bearing it crushed and mystified.”


Frost is always at his best, I think, when communicating to us the gravity our choices make for the course of our life. We have great choice—free will, one might argue—but the growing collection of our choices eventually become a force all of its own, putting us on the “wrack” and subject to “nothing but what we somehow chose.”