We'll Dig His Grave With A Silver Spade

Today was a mixed bag. So was the whole of this week, actually. On the upside, I got to talk about Robert Frost with my seniors today, and they actually participated in discussion and analysis of it, to my surprise and delight.

Which segues into the point of this entry. Robert Frost is probably my favorite poet, certainly of the early 20th century. T.S. Eliot is amazing, and e.e. cummings was groundbreaking, but there is something about Frost's work that really resonates with me. "The Road Not Taken" is the quintessential Fall poem, and the bittersweetness of it sets me thinking about life and all the myriad steps that lead up to the present moment. It's this sort of ode to the "What If" game, while at the same time, accepting the results from decisions made, without trying to return to a point in the past which is irrevocably lost.

At the same time, there's this guarded optimism about the choice made; the options have been weighed, everything considered, and a decision is reached. There's no real second-guessing, just this sense of "well, if I get the chance, I'll get back to this." Given my apparently congenital inability to let go of things, this is something to which I aspire.

I know you've all read the poem, but it bears posting, I think:

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.

Later, flipsiders.