Poems About Life\'s Constant Movement Toward the End

¶ … deliberations -- deeply thoughtful, philosophical ponderings -- about traveling through life and encountering troubling decisions, then asking questions vis-a-vis those decisions. Frost's "The Road Not Taken" turns out to be the road that was taken, although the speaker assures the reader that it was a tough decision. And in Rossetti's "Uphill" the speaker is unsure of the future but must keep traveling even though at the end of the journey the light is fading. Both poems embrace the confusion and even uncertainty about the future, and both are reflective of -- and in a real way they mirror -- how life moves along through time and why intelligent, thoughtful people can have fear of the future and can be troubled as to how and why the future will be kind or unkind to the individual.

Speakers

Poem One (Frost): Frost's speaker lets the reader know in the first stanza that he is in a bit of a quandary as to which road to take. "Long I stood," he writes, sounding a bit like an older person. His lines seem to convey a theme of an older person because older people are known to have trouble making up their minds, or at least they are known to be confused (at least momentarily) by choices in front of them. Older people have a lot of time on their hands so that explains why the speaker is in no hurry to choose a path to take. Moreover the speaker keeps reminding the reader that the roads are equal, and yet they aren't, which comes across as equivocation that one might associate with an older person. The theme then leads a reader to surmise that while the speaker has seemingly vacillated over which path / road to take -- even though they appear to be equally attractive to the eye -- in the end the right decision was made.

Poem Two (Rossetti): An alert reader might perceive the two speakers in Rossetti's poem as being young and old. The first speaker could be a young voice and the voice that answers seems wise and full of good advice. The journey in this poem could well be a metaphor for life's journey, not just to a hotel (inn) but to maturity and possibly death. Every question could be interpreted as a younger person asking an older person what the journey into maturity will entail. The line, "A roof for when the slow dark hours begin," seems to be suggesting that when a person gets on in years and slows down, and the light is beginning to vanish, that is old age. "May not the darkness hide it from my face?" The young speaker asks, and the wise voice answers, "You cannot miss that inn," which could be a metaphor for the fact that we all grow old and the end of the trail for all of us will be obvious.

Depictions of the Fathers

Poem One (Frost): The truth about fathers is that during their lifetimes they have been obligated to make choices. Sometimes they have hesitated and contemplated what choice to make; for example, should I encourage my child to take this one path to adulthood, or maybe I should urge him to take a different path to his future? Fathers are not always rational either, and the poet has not chosen which road to travel based on any logical or rational reasoning. The father may be "sorry" (as the poet was) that he couldn't do both things in life that he wanted to. He was torn perhaps at the beginning of his career (journey) about whether to follow one possibility or the other possibility for success and happiness. "I shall be telling this with a sigh," the poet explains, "somewhere ages and ages hence"; here the "sigh" can mean that the father has regrets that he didn't take the other road or it could mean he is satisfied that he did take the right road. "Ages and ages hence…" could simply be a smokescreen to mean in a few years, which will seem like a long, long time. The "sigh" to the mind of this paper is a kind of regret, looking back, that he chose a road that didn't get him to the place he had hoped to go. Also, fathers are known to exaggerate; they may do one particular thing and then later explain that they didn't really do that for the reasons that seemed apparent at the time. To wit, early in the poem the speaker explains that both roads are very similar, both had not been traveled on (they were "…really about the same") in terms of being traveled on. But in the end the father says he took the one "less traveled by" contradicting what he earlier asserted. Fathers have that right, apparently.

Poem Two (Rossetti): One interpretation of the "father" in this poem would be that the child asks questions and the father (or adult guardian) answers. "Father" might be God (or Allah), preparing the younger person for the end of the journey of life. If a person is looking for a clue that "Father" is God (and the younger person is alive and looking for answers about the great mysteries of life), the last line offers it: "Yea, beds for all who come" -- the "yea" sounds very biblical ("Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…"). "Seek, and you shall find," Jesus said in Luke. The voice asking questions in this poem is truly a seeker.