Auden’s Road Not Taken, Edward Thomas’s Road to Death: Imaginary Choices and Big Decisions

Edward Thomas's memorial stone on a hillside near Steep. Suzanne Knights, my photo, July 2006. Public Domain. 

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In February of last year, Norh Carolina poet and fiction writer Sally Thomas wrote a Substack post on Edward Thomas's poem, “February Afternoon.” She included a brief description of Thomas’s crucial friendship with Robert Frost:
 
“Frost’s own famous poem, ‘The Road Not Taken,’ was reportedly inspired by the two poets’ walks together during the American’s 1914 sojourn in England. Frost had intended the poem as a gentle poke at indecision generally, but also at Thomas in particular, as the latter debated within himself whether or not to enlist as a soldier. Frost, whose urging had prompted Thomas to write poetry in the first place, surely cannot have intended that his poem should make his friend’s mind up for him in the way that it appears to have done”—that is, to volunteer to fight in France, a decision that led to his death.

An earlier article, by Katherine Robinson ("Robert Frost: 'The Road Not Taken': Our choices are made clear in hindsight”):

"Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been 'taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. … Mea culpa.’”

Robinson goes on to find a deeper meaning in the poem: in part, it's about the way we look back on our casual, even whimsical choices, and find in them meaningful decisions.

Lately, I've been reading and rereading Auden's 1955 collection, The Shield of Achilles, and I noticed a poem that views much of our decision-making as self-deception. The poem is, I would like to believe, a gloss on Frost’s poem—not an explanation so much as Auden’s serious joke in response to Frost’s.

In “A Permanent Way,” Auden imagines himself as a train traveler who sees landscapes with "Intriguing dales" that he might be tempted to explore. But, should he actually find himself “Where a foot-path leaves the pike // For some steep romantic spot,” he would get down to practicalities: would the path bring him a little money or familial affection?


     But, forcibly held to my tracks, 
     I can safely relax and dream 
     Of a love and a livelihood 
     To fit that wood or stream; 

     And what could be greater fun, 
     Once one has chosen and paid, 
     Than the inexpensive delight 
     Of a choice one might have made.
 
     --The Shield of Achilles (W.H. Auden: Critical Editions) (p. 33). Kindle Edition.
 
Like Frost, Auden is joking with a serious point: those who are well established on a “permanent way”—whose “good old train … jog[s] / To the dogma of its rails”—deceive themselves if they believe they can casually abandon it for “some steep romantic spot.”

[NOTE: Auden seems to be working effortlessly here, but note how the a b c b rhyme scheme is  enriched, as Auden often does: by a word in the middle of the second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme with the last word in the first and third lines, for example:

     But, forcibly held to my TRACKS, 
     I can safely reLAX and dream
     Of a love and a liveliHOOD 
     To fit that WOOD or stream....] 
​
*****

But people do leave their seemingly permanent ways, their loved ones, their solitude, and their livelihoods. Our exhibit is Edward Thomas, who gave up a successful and influential, if not remunerative, career as a writer to enlist in the army, leaving behind a wife and three children. Because of his wife and children, he could have spent the war as a civilian, but he enlisted. Because of his age, he could have served in England, but he volunteered to go to the front, with its high death rate for officers.
 
His choices were obviously big decisions. A paper by Edna Ullmann-Margalit, “Big Decisions: Opting, Converting, Drifting” characterizes as big a type of decision that

• is transformative;
• is irrevocable;
• is taken in full awareness;
• leaves behind a lingering shadow in the choice not made.

[NOTE: The paper is available from several online sources. I downloaded it from the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a source I can no longer find online.]

By “transformative,” Ullman-Margalit means that big decisions “change one’s cognitive and evaluative systems. Inasmuch as our beliefs and desires shape the core of what we are as rational decision makers, we may say that one emerges from an opting situation a different person” (opting is her for making a big decision).

Such small decisions lead to transformation over time, the kind of decision made by Frost’s traveler: the effects of his choosing a path becomes evident only “ages and ages hence.” But Ullman-Margalit is focusing on decisions that lead to a “point of sharp discontinuity” in a life, “an abrupt transformation.”

Big decisions are irrevocable: “one is embarking upon a road that is one way only, leaving burning bridges behind. A reversal in the ordinary sense is impossible.” One has become a different person.

Big decisions are “taken in full awareness”: “[T]he person believes (a) that he or she must make a genuine choice between viable alternatives, and (b) that the decision they are called upon to make is ‘big’ – transformative and irrevocable.” Frost’s speaker is not aware of making that sort of decision; the diverging paths are quite similar. Auden’s speaker is aware that he has no real choice, though for a while he may entertain the fancy of choosing a different life.

Finally, the choice not made lingers in the consciousness: “[W]hat is of significance to the [chooser’s] account of his or her own life is not only the option they have taken, but also the one they have rejected: the person one did not marry, the country one did not emigrate to, the career one did not pursue. The rejected option enters in an essential way into the person's description of his or her life. The shadow presence maintained by the rejected option may constitute a yardstick by which this person evaluates the worth, success or meaning of his or her life.”

Frost’s traveler does, after a considerable period, look back with a sigh, but would not be able to define the rejected choice: it was just another path more or less indistinguishable from the chosen path. “Forcibly held to my tracks,” Auden’s speaker had no real choice, but that realization is comforting, not dismaying. He can “safely relax and dream,” protected from the risks of choice.

What makes Ullmann-Margalit’s paper so interesting to me is the discontinuity, the before and after of a big decision. (Here I will oversimplify and probably distort her paper.) Since the big decision by definition transforms the self, the basis of rational choice is different on each side of the discontinuity. How then can one rationally make a big decision? I am choosing to be another person (called the New Person by Ullman-Margalit) whose values and bases for evaluation I don’t share. 

“Picking” is defined by Ullman-Margalit as the type of decision one makes when the choice is meaningless and therefore not really a choice; for example, one picks a sixpack of Diet Coke from a shelfful of identical sixpacks. No grounds for preference exist; one might have picked any of them: “One chooses for reasons; one picks when reasons cannot prevail.” But the same condition exists for truly big decisions:

“These fundamental choices, then, cannot really be choices; so are they instances of picking? These are after all the biggest, in the sense of weightiest, decisions we may ever have to make. I believe that a similar intuition underlies Kant’s position about the free yet ultimately inscrutable act of choice ('Wilkuer') to adhere to the maxim of the universal moral law. I also believe that an intuition like this underlies the understanding of the absurd in the writings of Karl Schmidt and of the Existentialist thinkers, notably Heidegger and Sartre. At bottom, we make our most fundamental choices of the canons of morality, logic and rationality in total freedom and without appeal to reasons. They embody acts that this literature variously describes as nihilist, absurd, or leaps (of faith).”

Posted 30 May 2025; edited/corrected 3 June 2025. Send comments, questions, etc., to [email protected].