 Cynthia Reeves, “October Landscape,” mid-1960s vi they flutter again leaves in the river flowing by ***** My son and I used to sit on the exposed roots of a sycamore and cool our feet in the Eno River. Sometimes one of us would slide out a long limb stretching over the river. I liked to watch the leaves come downstream and flutter as they entered the riffling shoal beside the tree, sometimes to reemerge and sometimes to go under for good. When the light was favorable, we could see the little fish at the edge of the riffle searching the current for edible tidbits carried downstream. The current wasn’t very strong; the fish hovered in place with an occasional movement of tail fin and pectoral fins and probably many adjustments too fine for my uneducated eye to notice. Behind us were the ruins of a mill and millrace. Once or twice, in a pool formed by curving roots of the tree, we saw two or three small water snakes. It was a good place to observe, a good place to think, a good place to let the mind quietly wander. ****** as I doze on sycamore roots the water snakes play An imagined scene: full moon water snakes swimming in circles of light ***** I found that walking through the woods, especially along the river, was a good place to ponder the choices I'd made and those I had to make. Considering deeply the path to take in the Eno River State Park was unnecessary—the paths were all loops and ended up where they started. But as I walked or stopped to let the flowing river still my mind, my thoughts would often go back over the week and then farther back, considering happy moments and unpleasant moments, coming to terms with successes and failures and sometimes picturing what a happier life in the future might look like. The speaker in Frost’ s “The Road Not Taken” considers which road to take—not loops, because he does not expect to return to the spot: “knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.” The speaker says at first that the roads are about equally traveled: “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,” but later he concludes he “took the road less traveled by.” Perhaps he cannot know the path is less traveled until he chooses it and sees how few make the same choice. Or perhaps he looks at it that way because it fits his self-understanding, for example, as a nonconformist who chooses to go it alone or as a failure who ends in unwished for solitude. Update: A reader of the blog noted that the traveler is projecting what he will think "ages and ages hence." Frost was surprised at how seriously his readers took the poem. He thought it a kind of high fooling, and perhaps the fooling occurs when the poem switches to a future perspective: today the traveler takes a path not significantly different than the alternative, yet in the distant future (he predicts) he will see the chosen path as "less traveled by." The choice becomes significant only in retrospect. From wisdom or self-deception? The path that was not chosen receives the honor of the title. One traveler cannot take both paths. "What ifs" abound: would it have turned out differently if I'd taken the other way? Recently I read a brief discussion by Sally Thomas regarding the friendship between Robert Frost and Edward Thomas. The discussion takes place in the shadow of “The Road Not Taken.” When the two met, Thomas was considering suicide. Frost helped him turn his creativity and emotions into poetry. But poetry did not cure his depression or self-doubt. He continued to question constantly the value of his life; he was, in Sally Thomas’s words, “tortured by the conviction that his life had been good for nothing.” The two men met not long before the outbreak of the First World War. “The Road Not Taken” was published in 1915. When Frost, now back in America, shared the poem with his friend, Thomas was shaken. He took the poem far more seriously than Frost intended—he apparently took the “sigh” as a reflection on his choices. His understanding of the poem helped form his resolution to go to war. It also damaged his friendship with Frost. For the role of “The Road Not Taken” in Thomas’s decision to enlist and its impact on his friendship with Frost, see the excellent essay by Matthew Hollis. As a solution to his need for meaning and resolution, Thomas chose to join the army and then go overseas. He was killed in the Battle of Arras in 1917. In light of the discussion, I reread some favorite poems by Edward Thomas. “As the Team's Head Brass” was written in late May 1916 (Hibberd and Onions, The Winter of the World: Poems of the Great War). By then, Thomas had enlisted and he had already decided to apply for service overseas (because of his age, he could have stayed in England), but in the poem he is struggling with the decision. The first speaker in the excerpt is a farmer ploughing a field. At the end of the row he stops to talk to the poet: ‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’ ‘If I could only come back again, I should. I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so, I should want nothing more ...' The poem represents various paths in life—the lovers who disappear into the woods at the beginning of the poem and emerge from the woods near its end; the men from the farmer’s village who have gone to war, some to perish, including one of his mates that worked the farm; the farmer himself who has remained on the land; the poet who does or does not choose to join up. Later, when Thomas was waiting to be deployed overseas, he wrote in “Lights Out”: There is not any book Or face of dearest look That I would not turn from now To go into the unknown I must enter, and leave, alone, I know not how. Thousands went the same way, freely chosen or not, but it must have been a lonely road. ***** “The Road Not Taken” is a foil to a trope in Western literature. In the parable known as “The Choice of Hercules” (attributed to Prodicus and passed down by Xenophon), Hercules comes to a crossroads and must choose between the path of virtue, with its hardship and honor, and the path of pleasure. The choice before Frost’s traveler is not defined with this clarity, yet it is significant. It “made all the difference,” if we read the poem without irony, though we are not given to understand the difference. In an eight-line French poem by Rilke, different paths run between two meadows, but they offer no meaningful choice: paradoxically, they seem to veer away from their goal and so go nowhere. Before them is nothing but what’s ahead, space and time, often without a moral or existential significance: Chemins qui ne mènent nulle part entre deux prés, que l’on dirait avec art de leur but détournés, chemins qui souvent n’ont devant eux rien d’autre en face que le pur espace et la saison. Paths that lead nowhere between two meadows but seem like artful detours away from their goal, paths often with nothing before them but what’s ahead, nothing but pure space and the season. ***** This painting by Cynthia Reeves (“Autumn Path,” 1980) suggests a way into a dense green that may not be a path at all unless someone decides to walk that way:  My path in life increasingly resembles the journey described in John Henry Newman’s hymn:
Lead, kindly Light, amid th’ encircling gloom, Lead Thou me on; The night is dark, and I am far from home, Lead Thou me on; Keep Thou my feet; I do not ask to see The distant scene; one step enough for me. Posted 29 October 2024; updated 30 October 2024
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