Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is one of the best known poems in the English language, used in commercials, scribed on motivational desktop wallpaper and recited by fifth-graders at D.A.R.E. graduations.

Here are the lines we all know:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Americans (and much of the first world) love and aim to live by the message: Chase adventure. Go against the grain. Get comfortable being uncomfortable.

Sure, the hills may be steep, the terrain may be rocky, and you’ll probably step in piles of shit along the way, but the rewards can be greater and life can be fuller by taking the uncharted path.

It’s a hopeful—and very Western—sentiment, but the problem with this interpretation is that it is likely wrong. In a fascinating and complex thread in Reddit’s Books community, redditors discussed the poem’s common misreading, and what this long-held takeaway says about our culture.

The discussion centered on an excerpt from a book by David Orr titled The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong. Orr, the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, breaks down the 100-year poem to show that Frost is really saying—and here’s the shocker—the roads are actually equal and it doesn’t matter which one we choose.

Wait, what?

Orr argues that reading Frost’s poem as a paean to individualism is misguided, and all we have to do is zoom out and read it in its entirety to see why.

Here’s the whole poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.



It’s the middle of the poem that many readers have glossed over. Frost writes: “Though as for that the passing there had worn them really about the same, and both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.”

So the paths are really “about the same,” or interchangeable. It is only after the speaker has made the choice and lived out the consequences—“somewhere ages and ages hence”—that he looks back and attaches meaning to his choices.

Writes Orr:

… this is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices (as opposed to what was chosen for us or allotted to us by chance). The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. “The Road Not Taken” may be, as the critic Frank Lentricchia memorably put it, “the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.” But we could go further: It may be the best example in all of American culture of a wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Redditors weighed in with their own analyses.

Some discussed the importance of editing our stories in our minds.

Others pondered the weight we give to choices and events.

Perhaps sometimes we do this to puff ourselves up.

Or maybe rid ourselves of guilt:

Others noted that we give meaning to our choices because in the end, our stories are what matter to us, what define us.

Or if you’re Piper Chapman, you see it this way. In a scene from Orange is the New Black, the inmate (played by Taylor Schilling) gives her rundown of the Frost poem.

“Everyone thinks the poem means to break away from the crowd and do your own thing, but if you read it, Frost is very clear that the two roads are exactly the same. He just chooses one at random. And then it’s only later at a dinner party when he’s talking about it, that he tells everyone he chose the road less traveled by, but he’s lying. So the point of the poem is that everyone wants to look back and think that their choices matter. But in reality, shit just happens the way that it happens, and it doesn’t matter.”

Maybe shit just happens the way it happens, and it doesn’t matter.