David kindly has offered to lead the discussion of the following poems by Robert Frost:
The Road Not Taken (discussed at Rundel on 9/17)
Directive
The Oven Bird
Never Again Would the Birds Song Be the Same
A Winter Eden
Nothing Gold Can Stay
For The Road Not Taken, the book by David Orr of that title gives a thoughtful 184 page discussion on the various interpretations and misinterpretations... commentary on choice and American culture. Taken from the Amazon review:
"It doesn’t accept or reject its myth of choice but sets us up to feel the tensions involved in having to choose, as if each reader were the traveler. His decision might have been arbitrary, it might have been meaningful. It might have changed him deeply, it might not have. The options “blur and merge,” Orr writes; they are “like overlapping ghosts.” As he evocatively puts it, “Two potential poems revolve around each other, separating and overlapping like clouds in a way that leaves neither reading perfectly visible.”
It’s a good time to look not only at what we choose— but the how of choice, or even the state of not choosing, balancing and holding of paradox.
I have always been troubled by the last sentence-- the rhythm of "all the difference" has an extra limp...
The rhyming is clever -- not the usual jousting of a crossed rhyme, but four stanzas where the initial rhyme repeats both 3rd+ 4th line, to make 5-line stanzas.
ABAAB
It could have been a sonnet... and one wonders about Frost's choices.
In the Rundel discussion, we looked at the repeated pronoun "I"
I could not... I could, // I doubted, if I should
I shall/ and I (vs. the diverging paths)... I took...
a scenario as Jim put it of an "invitational I" in a "what if" scenario about choice.
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