![]() ![]() For any mass audience to recognize any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. In the commercial, this fact is never announced the audience is expected to recognize the poem unaided. It is, of course, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. ![]() Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice: But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. The advertisement I’ve just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold-for it’s a commercial we’ve been watching-the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he’s chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler. As a car slows to pick him up, we realize the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he’s accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past: the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. I couldn’t make up my mind, so I waited and waited and then didn’t ask her after all.From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, a new book by David Orr.Ī young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. Since I am supposed to reference a crossroads of my own, I’ll mention I was thinking about asking Anetta Fish, to the Junior-Senior last year. I am also supposed to tell about some crossroad I came upon. And a friend of mine, a big Jerry Seinfeld fan, said he heard Seinfeld say, “Sometimes the road less traveled is less traveled for a reason.” I wonder if Frost felt this way. She said she read that Frost once said he didn’t mean anything by writing this poem: he just wrote a poem. ![]() But sometimes the words are so old like that I don’t know what they ‘sayeth’.Ī girl in the hall from our teacher’s last class said that we would be writing about this poem. I guess that’s why we study literature – so we can learn something from it. Why would he? There is another poem that we read that mentioned one can never go home again. ![]() The third stanza said he didn’t turn back to return to the fork in the road. So, even though I don’t know the name, I thought I would throw that in here to let you know I was listening to part of what you were saying and hope that I get some extra points for bringing it up. When an inanimate object takes on personal qualities that is called some literary term I am supposed to know. The clock in my room tells me another 20 minutes. Bears and hanging snakes would have frightened me. There might be bears and snakes hanging from the trees to frighten him. How did he know that? He hadn’t walked that walk. If the grass wasn’t worn down to the dirt from previous hikers, how could he tell it was even a way to walk on at all? How did he know the grass wanted to be walked on? The poem said, “Because it was grassy and wanted wear”? What was that all about it? And Frost mentioned that he took the unused path because it was “just as fair”. So, why did he call them roads? Or a path? Neither was a path or road after all because there was still grass on both – just higher on one than the other. He followed as far as his eyes could see both paths to help him with his decision. He just tells us about his two choices staring him right in the face and how he stood for a long time looking at the paths. The poem, “The Road Not Taken” is supposed to be a telling tale, and yet Robert Frost does not tell us anything about his journey. Incorporate lines or ideas from the poem. This main idea in the poem is universal, so for the next 70 minutes, describe one of your own personal crossroads in the essay and the choice you made after confronting your own fork in the road. The main theme of the poem written on our classroom board by Robert Frost is that human beings are confronted with and ultimately defined by the choices they make. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” Timed Essay Take your pick of which fun to read first. Tattletales are the true stories from education and Shenanigans, parody real classroom events. My new book, “Teacher Tattletales and Other Southern Shenanigans,” is divided into two parts. Look for her on Facebook, Twitter and her blog at Her new release, “SHE’S A KEEPER! Cockamamie Memoirs from a Hot Southern Mess” can be found on. John, a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, is a No.1 Amazon ranked humorous author. ![]()
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