Comment by alabastervlog | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alabastervlog | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

What's amazing is it's not obscure. It's in the plain language of the poem—you either read it (something like) that way, or you have to, IDK, assume Frost was just so extremely sloppy or inept that he got all confused a couple times in the middle of writing this short poem but then published it that way regardless, and then also decide that the common reading (despite all the confusion and contradictions) is the one you're going with for—I can't even imagine what reason, because it's what you get if you only pay attention to the very beginning and very end of the poem, and not very close attention to those, even, I guess?

The latter is ridiculous... and yet common.

What this reveals is that an enormous proportion of people who can read, cannot do so at all well. This isn't like catching the multilingual puns and their significance in Finnegan's Wake, it's quite straightforward, at least insofar as it's plain that even the surface meaning is not "I in-fact took the road less traveled by, and that was good".

A more charitable interpretation might be that most people have read this poem maybe once while half paying attention in school and they have forgotten all of the details except for the famous line and the cultural context that it usually comes with.

I think your more charitable interpretation is also more-correct, but it is still an indictment of sorts: we’ve all read this poem, but very very few were critically paying attention to what we read. We mostly trusted our instincts, and didn’t care to double check.

To be fair, I don’t think we can expect more of elementary school kids. But I think I might have read it in high school, and should have done better.

I think the discrepancy comes from semantic overloading of the word "should" in "I doubted if I should ever come back." In older style English "should ever" can be interpreted as would ever happen to or would ever be able to but in contemporary English it's more likely to mean would ever want to.

There are other clues for the reader of course. One path looked less worn, but in retrospect it wasn't actually less worn. He would tell the story with a sigh, which isn't something you would typically do if you were happy about it. So I agree that it boils down to most people not being very good at reading nontrivial texts. But I don't agree that that this text is totally straightforward. It's not highly complicated, but it's not everyday text either.

Th "unconventional" interpretation being discussed here isn't new. I heard it from a college English professor in probably 1982 or so. Maybe it was unconventional then. Don't know. But my sense is that it's mostly not especially controversial today. As you say it's a pretty reasonable straight reading of a not especially complex short poem. Just not a reading that speaks to how a lot of people would prefer to read it.

It's a poem about self-deception, and Frost has cleverly extended that theme to encompass the reader.

He clearly wrote it the way he did to invite an easy, comfortable interpretation, one that is blatantly contradicted by the very evidence he presents. He's rubbing our noses in our own gullibility and tendency to deceive ourselves with comfortable lies, just as the narrator has done.

All in simple, direct language. Frost sure was a sneaky one.

I love books with hidden little things in books, like Hofstadter's GEB where he writes messages in the first letter of each line. Not to mention the plethora of meta self-references and recursions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com