Mountain Interval by Robert Frost

American poet Robert Frost published his collection Mountain Interval this year. This collection of poems, in my opinion, is the best collection to come out of America this year. It follows-up Frost’s debut work A Boy’s Will and, unlike his first collection, this one gives a much more vivid portrayal of rural America and American English speech. In an interview I found, Frost says he believes that "the self-imposed restrictions of meter in form is more helpful than harmful because I can focus on the content of my poems instead of concerning myself with creating "innovative" new verse forms.” Well, Frost definitely sticks to old forms of verse. His poem “The Road Not Taken” is a good example of Frost’s style. It describes a simple man thinking back on his life and choices and is written in more an iambic tetrameter than any free verse or Imagist or Vorticist form. But, nonetheless, the poem has a narrative-like quality and so beautifully yet sadly portrays a man’s relation to the world and all the opportunities and missed opportunities that that relation entails. Bask in the elegance and ambiguity of Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.”

The Road Not Taken

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 marked 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.