English literature

William Blake, The chimney sweeper: when my mother died I was very young.
Poet:
 Poet, painter, engraver, and visionary William Blake worked to bring about a change both in
the social order and in the minds of men. Though in his lifetime his work was largely
neglected or dismissed, he is now considered one of the leading lights of English poetry, and
his work has only grown in popularity. In his Life of William Blake (1863) Alexander
Gilchrist warned his readers that Blake “neither wrote nor drew for the many, hardly for
work’y-day men at all, rather for children and angels; himself ‘a divine child,’ whose
playthings were sun, moon, and stars, the heavens and the earth.” Yet Blake himself believed
that his writings were of national importance and that they could be understood by a majority
of his peers. Far from being an isolated mystic, Blake lived and worked in the teeming
metropolis of London at a time of great social and political change that profoundly influenced
his writing. In addition to being considered one of the most visionary of English poets and
one of the great progenitors of English Romanticism, his visual artwork is highly regarded
around the world.
 Blake was born on November 28, 1757. Blake was born into a family of moderate means. In
all, seven children were born to James and Catherine Wright Blake, but only five survived
infancy. Blake seems to have been closest to his youngest brother, Robert, who died young.
 By all accounts Blake had a pleasant and peaceful childhood, made even more pleasant by
skipping any formal schooling. At an early age, his unique mental powers would prove
disquieting. His parents encourage his artistic talents, and the young Blake was enrolled at
the age of 10 in Pars’ drawing school. The expense of continued formal training in art was a
prohibitive, and the family decided that at the age of 14 William would be apprenticed to a
master engraver. Instead of Ryland the family settled on a lesser-known engraver, James
Basire. Basire seems to have been a good master, and Blake was a good student of the craft.
 At the age of 21, Blake left Basire’s apprenticeship and enrolled for a time in the newly
formed Royal Academy. He earned his living as a journeyman engraver. Booksellers
employed him to engrave illustrations for publications ranging from novels such as Don
Quixote to serials such as Ladies’ Magazine.
 tn June of 1780 riots broke out in London incited by the anti-Catholic preaching of Lord
George Gordon and by resistance to continued war against the American colonists. Houses,
churches, and prisons were burned by uncontrollable mobs bent on destruction. On one
evening, whether by design or by accident, Blake found himself at the front of the mob that
burned Newgate prison. These images of violent destruction and unbridled revolution gave
Blake powerful material for works such as Europe (1794) and America (1793).
 Blake met Catherine Boucher. The couple were married on August 18, 1782. The parish
registry shows that Catherine could not sign her own name. Blake soon taught her to read and
to write, and under Blake’s tutoring she also became an accomplished draftsman, helping him
in the execution of his designs. By all accounts the marriage was a successful one, but no
children were born to the Blakes.
 Blake’s friend John Flaxman introduced Blake to the bluestocking Harriet Mathew, wife of
the Rev. Henry Mathew, whose drawing room was often a meeting place for artists and
musicians. There Blake gained favor by reciting and even singing his early poems. Thanks to
the support of Flaxman and Mrs. Mathew, a thin volume of poems was published under the
title Poetical Sketches (1783). Many of these poems are imitations of classical models, much
like the sketches of models of antiquity the young artist made to learn his trade. Even here,
 however, one sees signs of Blake’s protest against war and the tyranny of kings. Only about
50 copies of Poetical Sketches are known to have been printed. Blake’s financial enterprises
also did not fare well. In 1784, after his father’s death, Blake used part of the money he
inherited to set up shop as a printseller with his friend James Parker. The Blakes moved to 27
Broad Street, next door to the family home and close to Blake’s brothers. The business did
not do well, however, and the Blakes soon moved out.
 Of more concern to Blake was the deteriorating health of his favorite brother, Robert. Blake
tended to his brother in his illness and according to Gilchrist watched the spirit of his brother
escape his body in his death.
 Blake’s technique was to produce his text and design on a copper plate with an impervious
liquid. The plate was then dipped in acid so that the text and design remained in relief. That
plate could be used to print on paper, and the final copy would be then hand colored.
 After experimenting with this method in a series of aphorisms entitled There is No Natural
Religion and All Religions are One (1788?), Blake designed the series of plates for the poems
entitled Songs of Innocence and dated the title page 1789. Blake continued to experiment with
the process of illuminated writing and in 1794 combined the early poems with companion
poems entitled Songs of Experience. The title page of the combined set announces that the
poems show “the two Contrary States of the Human Soul.”
 The introductory poems to each series display Blake’s dual image of the poet as both a
“piper” and a “Bard.” As man goes through various stages of innocence and experience in the
poems, the poet also is in different stages of innocence and experience. The pleasant lyrical
aspect of poetry is shown in the role of the “piper” while the more somber prophetic nature of
poetry is displayed by the stern Bard.
 The dual role played by the poet is Blake’s interpretation of the ancient dictum that poetry
should both delight and instruct. More important, for Blake the poet speaks both from the
personal experience of his own vision and from the “inherited” tradition of ancient Bards and
prophets who carried the Holy Word to the nations.
 The two states of innocence and experience are not always clearly separate in the poems, and
one can see signs of both states in many poems. The companion poems titled “Holy
Thursday” are on the same subject, the forced marching of poor children to St. Paul’s
Cathedral in London. The speaker in the state of innocence approves warmly of the
progression of children:
 The brutal irony is that in this world of truly “innocent” children there are evil men who
repress the children, round them up like herd of cattle, and force them to show their piety. In
this state of innocence, experience is very much present.
 If experience has a way of creeping into the world of innocence, innocence also has a way of
creeping into experience. The golden land where the “sun does shine” and the “rain does fall”
is a land of bountiful goodness and innocence. But even here in this blessed land, there are
children starving. The sharp contrast between the two conditions makes the social
commentary all the more striking and supplies the energy of the poem.
 The storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 and the agonies of the French Revolution sent
shock waves through England. In much of his writing Blake argues against the monarchy. In
his early Tiriel (written circa 1789) Blake traces the fall of a tyrannical king.
 Politics was surely often the topic of conversation at the publisher Joseph Johnson’s house,
where Blake was often invited. There Blake met important literary and political figures such
as William Godwin, Joseph Priestly, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine.
 In The French Revolution Blake celebrates the rise of democracy in France and the fall of the
monarchy.
 On the title page for book one of The French Revolution Blake announces that it is “A Poem
in Seven Books,” but none of the other books has been found. Johnson never published the
 poem, perhaps because of fear of prosecution, or perhaps because Blake himself withdrew it
from publication. Johnson did have cause to be nervous. Erdman points out that in the same
year booksellers were thrown in jail for selling the works of Thomas Paine.
 In America (1793) Blake also addresses the idea of revolution–less as a commentary on the
actual revolution in America as a commentary on universal principles that are at work in any
revolution.
 The revolution in America suggests to Blake a similar revolution in England. Writing this
poem in the 1790s, Blake also surely imagined the possible effect of the French Revolution
on England.
 Another product of the radical 1790s is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Written and etched
between 1790 and 1793, Blake’s poem brutally satirizes oppressive authority in church and
state.
 The “Proverbs of Hell” are clearly designed to shock the reader out of his commonplace
notion of what is good and what is evil.
 The Marriage of Heaven and Hell contains many of the basic religious ideas developed in the
major prophecies. Blake analyzes the development of organized religion as a perversion of
ancient visions.The gods are seen as separate from man, and an elite race of priests is
developed to approach the gods. Instead of looking for God on remote altars, Blake warns,
man should look within.
 In August of 1790 Blake moved from his house on Poland Street across the Thames to the
area known as Lambeth. The Blakes lived in the house for 10 years, and the surrounding
neighborhood often becomes mythologized in his poetry. Felpham was a “lovely vale,” a
place of trees and open meadows, but it also contained signs of human cruelty, such as the
house for orphans. At his home Blake kept busy not only with his illuminated poetry but also
with the daily chore of making money. During the 1790s Blake earned fame as an engraver
and was glad to receive numerous commissions.
 One story told by Blake’s friend Thomas Butts shows how much the Blakes enjoyed the
pastoral surroundings of Lambeth. At the end of Blake’s garden was a small summer house,
and coming to call on the Blakes one day Butts was shocked to find the couple stark naked:
“Come in!” cried Blake; “it’s only Adam and Eve you know!” The Blakes were reciting
passages from Paradise Lost, apparently “in character."Sexual freedom is addressed in
Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), also written during the Lambeth period.
 Between 1793 and 1795 Blake produced a remarkable collection of illuminated works that
have come to be known as the “Minor Prophecies.” In Europe (1794), The First Book of
Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795), The Song of Los (1795), and The Book of Ahania
(1795) Blake develops the major outlines of his universal mythology. In these poems Blake
examines the fall of man. In Blake’s mythology man and God were once united, but man
separated himself from God and became weaker and weaker as he became further divided.
 The narrative of the universal mythology is interwoven with the historical events of Blake’s
own time. The execution of King Louis XVI in 1793 led to an inevitable reaction, and
England soon declared war on France. England’s participation in the war against France and
its attempt to quell the revolutionary spirit is addressed in Europe.
 The causes of that repression are examined in The First Book of Urizen. The word Urizen
suggests “your reason” and also “horizon.” He represents that part of the mind that constantly
defines and limits human thought and action.
 The poem traces the birth of Urizen as a separate part of the human mind. Urizen’s repressive
laws bring only further chaos and destruction. Appalled by the chaos he himself created,
Urizen fashions a world apart.
 In The Song of Los, Los sings of the decayed state of man, where the arbitrary laws of Urizen
have become institutionalized.
 The separation of man is also examined in The Book of Ahania, which Blake later
incorporated in Vala, or The Four Zoas. In The Book of Ahania Urizen is further divided into
male and female forms. Urizen is repulsed by his feminine shadow that is called Ahania.
 The Four Zoas is subtitled “The Torments of Love and Jealousy in the Death and Judgement
of Albion the Ancient Man,” and the poem develops Blake’s myth of Albion, who represents
both the country of England and the unification of all men. Albion is composed of “Four
Mighty Ones": Tharmas, Urthona, Urizen, and Luvah. Originally, in Eden, these four exist in
the unity of “The Universal Brotherhood.” At this early time all parts of man lived in perfect
harmony, but now they are fallen into warring camps. The poem traces the changes in Albion.
 Very little of Blake’s poetry of the 1790s was known to the general public. His reputation as
an artist was mixed. Response to his art ranged from praise to derision, but he did gain some
fame as an engraver. His commissions did not produce much in the way of income, but Blake
never seems to have been discouraged.
 Because of his monetary woes, Blake often had to depend on the benevolence of patrons of
the arts. This sometimes led to heated exchanges between the independent artist and the
wealthy patron. Dr. John Trusler was one such patron whom Blake failed to please. Dr.
Trusler was a clergyman, a student of medicine, a bookseller, and the author.. Dr. Trusler was
not the only patron that tried to make Blake conform to popular tastes; for example, Blake’s
stormy relation to his erstwhile friend and patron William Hayley directly affected the writing
of the epics Milton and Jerusalem.
 Blake left Felpham in 1803 and returned to London. In April of that year he wrote to Butts
that he was overjoyed to return to the city. In the same letter Blake refers to his epic poem
Milton, composed while at Felpham.
 In his “slumber on the banks of the Ocean,” Blake, surrounded by financial worries and
hounded by a patron who could not appreciate his art, reflected on the value of visionary
poetry. Milton, which Blake started to engrave in 1804 (probably finishing in 1808), is a
poem that constantly draws attention to itself as a work of literature,Blake examines the entire
range of mental activity involved in the art of poetry from the initial inspiration of the poet to
the reception of his vision by the reader of the poem. Milton examines as part of its subject
the very nature of poetry: what it means to be a poet, what a poem is, and what it means to be
a reader of poetry.
 "Book the First” contains a poem-within-a-poem, a “Bard’s Prophetic Song.” The Bard’s
Song describes man’s fall from a state of vision. Blake is at pains to show us that his
mythology is not something far removed from us but is part of our day to day life.
 In the second book of Milton Blake initiates the reader into the order of poets and prophets.
Blake continues the process begun in book one of taking the reader through different stages in
the growth of a poet.
 Turning the outside world upside down is a preliminary stage in an extensive examination of
man’s internal world. A searching inquiry into the self is a necessary stage in the development
of the poet. Milton is told he must first look within: “Judge then of thy Own Self: thy Eternal
Lineaments explore, / What is Eternal & what Changeable, & what Annihilable.” Central to
the process of judging the self is a confrontation with that destructive part of man’s identity
Blake calls the Selfhood, which blocks “the human center of creativity.” Only by annihilating
the Selfhood, Blake believes, can one hope to participate in the visionary experience of the
poem.
 As Blake attacks accepted notions of love, he also forces the reader to question the value
society places on reason. In his struggle with Urizen, who represents man’s limited power of
reason, Milton seeks to cast off the deadening effect of the reasoning power and free the mind
for the power of the imagination.
  Before Blake could leave Felpham and return to London, an incident occurred that was very
disturbing to him and possibly even dangerous. Without Blake’s knowledge, his gardener had
invited a soldier by the name of John Scofield into his garden to help with the work. Blake
seeing the soldier and thinking he had no business being there promptly tossed him out.
 What made this incident so serious was that the soldier swore before a magistrate that Blake
had said “Damn the King” and had uttered seditious words. Blake denied the charge, but he
was forced to post bail and appear in court. Blake left Felpham at the end of September 1803
and settled in a new residence on South Molton Street in London. His trial was set for the
following January at Chichester. The soldier’s testimony was shown to be false, and the jury
acquitted Blake.
 Blake’s radical political views made him fear persecution, and he wondered if Scofield had
been a government agent sent to entrap him. In any event Blake forever damned the soldier by
attacking him in the epic poem Jerusalem.
 Jerusalem is in many ways Blake’s major achievement. It is an epic poem consisting of 100
illuminated plates. Blake dated the title page 1804, but he seems to have worked on the poem
for a considerable length of time after that date. In Jerusalem he develops his mythology to
explore man’s fall and redemption. As the narrative begins, man is apart from God and split
into separate identities. As the poem progresses man’s split identities are unified, and man is
reunited with the divinity that is within him.
 It is sometimes easy to get lost in the complex mythology of Blake’s poetry and forget that he
is describing not outside events but a “Mental Fight” that takes place in the mind. Much of
Jerusalem is devoted to the idea of awakening the human senses, so that the reader can
perceive the spiritual world that is everywhere present.

Poem:

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said,

"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

And so he was quiet, & that very night,

As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!

That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack,

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins & set them all free;

Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run,

And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,

They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.

And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,

He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark

And got with our bags & our brushes to work.

Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

 The poem is in the first person, about a very young chimney sweeper who exposes the evils of
chimney sweeping as a part of the cruelties created by the sudden increase in wealth.
 The poem was used as a broadsheet or propaganda against the evil of Chimney Sweeping.
The Chimney Sweeper’s life was one of destitution and exploitation. The large houses created
by the wealth of trade had horizontal flues heating huge rooms that could be cleaned only by a
small child crawling through them. These flues literally became black coffins, which killed
many little boys. A sweeper’s daily task was courting death because of the hazards of
suffocation and burns. These children were either orphans or founding or were sold by poor
parents to Master Sweepers for as little as two guineas. They suffered from cancers caused by
the soot, and occasionally little children terrified of the inky blackness of the Chimneys got
lost within them and only their skeletons were recovered.

Stanza 1

When my mother died I was very young,

And my father sold me while yet my tongue

Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"

So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.

 In these twenty-four lines of William Blake’s poem, ‘The Chimney Sweeper,’ a little boy, is
telling the story of his despairing life as well as the sad tales of other chimney sweeper boys.
The little boy narrates that he was very young when his mother died. He was then sold by his
father to a Master Sweeper when his age was so tender that he could not even pronounce the
word ‘sweep’ and cryingly pronounced it ‘weep’ and wept all the time. The pun intended
through the use of the word ‘weep’ three times in the third line of this stanza holds pathetic
significance. Most chimney-sweepers, like him, were so young that they could not pronounce
sweep and lisped ‘weep’. Since that tender age, the little boy is sweeping the chimney and
sleeping at night in the soot-smeared body, without washing off the soot (blackness).

Stanza 2
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head

That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said,

"Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,

You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."

 In the second stanza, the little narrator tells us the woeful tale of Tom Dacre. This is a very
famous character in Blake’s many poems. Tom was called ‘Dacre’ because he belonged to
Lady Dacre’s Almshouse, which was situated between St. James Street and Buckingham
Road. The inmates of the Almshouse were foundling orphans, who were allowed to be
adopted by the poor only. It may be a foster father who encased the boy Tom by selling him
to a Master Sweeper. Tom wept when his head was shaved, just as the back of a lamb is
shaved for wool. The narrator then told Tom not to weep and keep his peace. The narrator
told Tom to be calm because lice will not breed in the pate without hair and there will be no
risk for hair to catch fire.

Stanza 3
And so he was quiet, & that very night,

As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!

That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack,

Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;

 The third stanza continues the story of Tom who was calmed by the consoling words of the
narrator. That same night while sleeping Tom saw a wonderful vision. He saw in his dream
that many Chimney sweepers, who were named Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack, were dead and their
bodies were lying in caged coffins, made of black-colored wood.

Stanza 4

And by came an Angel who had a bright key,

And he opened the coffins & set them all free;

Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing they run,

And wash in a river and shine in the Sun.

 In the fourth stanza, the vision is completed. An Angel, who was carrying a shining key, came
near the coffins. The Angel opened the coffins containing the bodies and set all the bodies
free from the bondage of coffins. The freed little sweepers of the chimney ran down a green
ground, washed in the water of a river, and dried themselves in the sunlight to give out a clean
shine. This was really a very delightful moment for these chimney-sweepers, who got freed
from the shackles of bondage labor, exploitation, and child labor.

Stanza 5
Then naked & white, all their bags left behind,

They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind.

And the Angel told Tom, if he'd be a good boy,

He'd have God for his father & never want joy.

In the fifth stanza, the little boy continues narrating the dream vision of Tom. All the little boys were
naked and white after washing. They were naked because their bags of clothes were left behind. They
cast off the burden of life along with the bags of soot at the time of death. Now naked and white, the
little chimney sweeper boys ride the clouds and play in the wind. The image of clouds floating freely
is Blake’s metaphor for the freedom from the material boundaries of the body and an important visual
symbol. The Angel told Tom that if he would be a good boy he would have God for his father and
there would never be a lack of happiness for him.

Stanza 6
And so Tom awoke; and we rose in the dark

And got with our bags & our brushes to work.

Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy & warm;

So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

 In the last stanza of Blake’s poem, The Chimney Sweeper, the narrator tells that Tom woke up
and his dream vision broke up. Tom and other little sweeper boys rose up from their beds in
the dark. They made themselves ready to work taking their bags for soot and the brushes to
clean the chimney. The morning was cold, but Tom, after the dream, was feeling warm and
happy.

In the last line of the poem, a moral has been thrown to us: If all do their duty, they need not fear any
harm. The last stanza shows the reality of the sweepers’ life. The antithesis between the vision of
summer sunshine and this dark, cold reality is deeply ironic. Even though the victims have been
mollified, the readers know that innocent trust is abused.

 ‘The Chimney Sweeper’ consists of six quatrains, each following the AABB rhyme scheme,
with two rhyming couplets per quatrain. Through this poem, the poet sheds light on the
pitiable condition of the chimney sweepers who were being exploited by their Masters.
 This is a poem that describes the rampant bondage labor, child labor, exploitation of children
at a tender age, and the pitiable condition of the orphaned children or the poor children who
were sold by their poor parents.
 In all, this poem sarcastically attacks the advanced societies that keep their eyes shut toward
these children, but act as being generous among their near and dear ones by holding or
attending some charity shows/functions for the poor and down-trodden people in their
country. Moreover, it is surprising to note here that these social evils even today prevail in our
society.
William Wordsworth: Lines written in early spring

Poet:

 William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English Romanticism and one its most
central figures and important intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and
epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human relationship to nature and a
fierce advocate of using the vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry. The
son of John and Ann Cookson Wordsworth, William Wordworth was born on April 7, 1770 in
Cockermouth, Cumberland, located in the Lake District of England: an area that would
become closely associated with Wordsworth for over two centuries after his death. He began
writing poetry as a young boy in grammar school, and before graduating from college he went
on a walking tour of Europe, which deepened his love for nature and his sympathy for the
common man: both major themes in his poetry. Wordsworth is best known for Lyrical
Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and The Prelude, a Romantic epic poem
chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.”
 Wordsworth’s deep love for the “beauteous forms” of the natural world was established early.
The Wordsworth children seem to have lived in a sort of rural paradise along the Derwent
River, which ran past the terraced garden below the ample house whose tenancy
 William attended the grammar school near Cockermouth Church and Ann Birkett’s school at
Penrith, the home of his maternal grandparents. The intense lifelong friendship between
William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy probably began when they, along with Mary
Hutchinson, attended school at Penrith. Wordsworth’s early childhood beside the Derwent
and his schooling at Cockermouth are vividly recalled in various passages of The Prelude and
in shorter poems such as the sonnet “Address from the Spirit of Cockermouth Castle.” His
experiences in and around Hawkshead, where William and Richard Wordsworth began
attending school in 1779, would also provide the poet with a store of images and sensory
experience that he would continue to draw on throughout his poetic career, but especially
during the “great decade” of 1798 to 1808. This childhood idyll was not to continue, however.
In March of 1778 Ann Wordsworth died while visiting a friend in London. In June 1778
Dorothy was sent to live in Halifax, Yorkshire, with her mother’s cousin Elizabeth Threlkeld,
and she lived with a succession of relatives thereafter. She did not see William again until
1787.
 In December of 1783 John Wordsworth, returning home from a business trip, lost his way and
was forced to spend a cold night in the open. Very ill when he reached home, he died
December 30. Though separated from their sister, all the boys eventually attended school
together at Hawkshead, staying in the house of Ann Tyson. In 1787, despite poor finances
caused by ongoing litigation over Lord Lowther's debt to John Wordsworth's estate,
Wordsworth went up to Cambridge as a sizar in St. John’s College. As he himself later noted,
Wordsworth’s undergraduate career was not distinguished by particular brilliance. In the third
book of The Prelude Wordsworth recorded his reactions to life at Cambridge and his
changing attitude toward his studies. During his last summer as an undergraduate, he and his
college friend Robert Jones—much influenced by William Coxe’s Sketches of the Natural,
Civil, and Political State of Swisserland (1779)—decided to make a tour of the Alps,
departing from Dover on July 13, 1790.
 Though Wordsworth, encouraged by his headmaster William Taylor, had been composing
verse since his days at Hawkshead Grammar School, his poetic career begins with this first
trip to France and Switzerland. During this period he also formed his early political opinions
—especially his hatred of tyranny. These opinions would be profoundly transformed over the
coming years but never completely abandoned. Wordsworth was intoxicated by the
 combination of revolutionary fervor he found in France—he and Jones arrived on the first
anniversary of the storming of the Bastille—and by the impressive natural beauty of the
countryside and mountains. Returning to England in October, Wordsworth was awarded a
pass degree from Cambridge in January 1791, spent several months in London, and then
traveled to Jones’s parents’ home in North Wales. During 1791 Wordsworth’s interest in both
poetry and politics gained in sophistication, as natural sensitivity strengthened his perceptions
of the natural and social scenes he encountered.
 Wordsworth’s passion for democracy, as is clear in his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff”
(also called “Apology for the French Revolution”), is the result of his two youthful trips to
France. In November 1791 Wordsworth returned to France, where he attended sessions of the
National Assembly and the Jacobin Club. In December he met and fell in love with Annette
Vallon, and at the beginning of 1792 he became the close friend of an intellectual and
philosophical army officer, Michel Beaupuy, with whom he discussed politics. Wordsworth
had been an instinctive democrat since childhood, and his experiences in revolutionary France
strengthened and developed his convictions. His sympathy for ordinary people would remain
with Wordsworth even after his revolutionary fervor had been replaced with the “softened
feudalism” he endorsed in his Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland in 1818.
 While still in France, Wordsworth began work on the first extended poetic efforts of his
maturity, Descriptive Sketches, which was published in 1793, after the appearance of a poem
written at Cambridge, An Evening Walk (1793). He left France in early December 1792
before Annette Vallon gave birth to his child Caroline. Back in England, the young radical
cast about for a suitable career. As a fervent democrat, he had serious reservations about
“vegetating in a paltry curacy,” though he had written to his friend William Matthews in May
1792 that he intended to be ordained the following winter or spring. Perhaps this plan was
why he was reading sermons early in 1793, when he came across a sermon by Richard
Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, on “the Wisdom and Goodness of God” in making both rich and
poor, with an appendix denouncing the French Revolution. His democratic sympathies
aroused, he spent several weeks in February and March working on a reply.
 By this time, his relationship with Annette Vallon had become known to his English relatives,
and any further opportunity of entering the Church was foreclosed. In any case Wordsworth
had been reading atheist William Godwin’s recently published Political Justice (1793), and
had come powerfully under its sway. “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” is the youthful poet
and democrat’s indignant reply to the forces of darkness, repression, and monarchy. Its prose
shares something of the revolutionary clarity of Thomas Paine’s. Just how radical
Wordsworth’s political beliefs were during this period can be judged from other passages in
this “Letter”.
 “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff” is remarkable partly because Wordsworth seems to have
begun relinquishing its tenets almost as soon as he had composed them. Though he remained
for the time being a strong supporter of the French Revolution, the poetic side of
Wordsworth’s personality began asserting itself, causing the poet to reexamine, between 1793
and 1796, his adherence to Godwin’s rationalistic model of human behavior, upon which
Wordsworth’s republicanism was largely founded. Whether “A Letter to Bishop the of
Llandaff” remained unpublished through caution or circumstance is not clear. As Wordsworth
turned his attention to poetry, he developed, through the process of poetic composition, his
own theory of human nature, one that had very little to do with Godwin’s rationalism. During
this period Wordsworth met another radical young man with literary aspirations, Samuel
Taylor Coleridge.
 In 1794 and 1795 Wordsworth divided his time between London and the Lake Country. In
September 1795 William and Dorothy Wordsworth settled at Racedown Lodge in Dorset,
where they would live for two years. In The Prelude Wordsworth wrote that his sister
 “Maintained a saving intercourse / With my true self,” and “preserved me still / A poet.” At
Racedown Wordsworth composed the tragedy The Borderers, a tragedy in which he came
fully to terms with Godwin’s philosophy, finally rejecting it as an insufficiently rich approach
to life for a poet. Then Wordsworth for the first time found his mature poetic voice, writing
The Ruined Cottage, which would be published in 1814 as part of The Excursion, itself
conceived as one part of a masterwork, The Recluse, which was to worry Wordsworth
throughout his life, a poem proposed to him by Coleridge and planned as a full statement of
the two poets’ emerging philosophy of life.
 In 1797, to be closer to Coleridge, the Wordsworths moved to Alfoxden House, near the
village of Nether Stowey. Because of the odd habits of the household—especially their
walking over the countryside at all hours—the local population suspected that the
Wordsworths and their visitors were French spies, and a government agent was actually
dispatched to keep an eye on them. The years between 1797 and 1800 mark the period of
Wordsworth and Coleridge’s close collaboration, and also the beginning of Wordsworth’s
mature poetic career. Wordsworth wrote the poems that would go into the 1798 and 1800
editions of Lyrical Ballads—poems such as “Tintern Abbey,” “Expostulation and Reply,”
“The Tables Turned,” “Goody Blake and Harry Gill,” and “Michael.” During 1798
Wordsworth also worked on a piece of prose setting out his evolving ideas on justice and
morality. Called the “Essay on Morals” by later editors, it was set aside and never finished.
Wordsworth seems to have been attempting to work out and justify his changing political and
social ideas—ideas that had begun to develop intuitively during the process of poetic
composition. The poet in Wordsworth was beginning to dominate the democrat, and the poet
found a political philosophy based on power, violence, and reason anathema.
 In September 1798 the Wordsworths set off for Germany with Coleridge, returning
separately, after some disagreements, in May 1799. In Germany Wordsworth continued to
write poems, and when he returned to England he began to prepare a new edition of Lyrical
Ballads. The second edition—that of 1800—included an extended preface by Wordsworth,
explaining his reasons for choosing to write as he had and setting out a personal poetics that
has remained influential and controversial to the present day. For Victorian readers such as
Matthew Arnold, who tended to venerate Wordsworth, the preface was a fount of wisdom;
but the modernists were deeply suspicious of Wordsworth’s reliance on feeling: poets such as
T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, while they could accept the strictures on poetic diction, found the
underlying theory unacceptable. Subsequent critics have focused on the literary and historical
sources of Wordsworth’s ideas, demonstrating that, while the poet certainly reinvented
English poetic diction, his theories were deeply rooted in the practice of earlier poets,
especially John Milton. This preface, Wordsworth’s only extended statement of his poetics,
has become the source of many of the commonplaces and controversies of poetic theory and
criticism. For Wordsworth, poetry, which should be written in “the real language of men,” is
nevertheless “the spontaneous overflow of feelings: it takes its origin from emotion
recollected in tranquility.”
 The “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” is not a systematic poetics, but a partly polemical, partly
pedantic, and still problematic statement of Wordsworth’s beliefs about poetry and poetic
language. He had also come to the conclusion that the troubles of society were specifically
urban in nature. This view finds eloquent expression in Wordsworth’s most powerful early
poem, “Tintern Abbey.” Thinking of the way in which his memories of the Wye River valley
had sustained him.
 The poem concludes with a meditation on the power of nature to prevail against the false and
superficial “dreary intercourse of daily life” that Wordsworth associated with city life,
especially literary life in London.
 In a letter to Catherine Clarkson years later (June 4, 1812), Wordsworth blamed not social
institutions but people themselves for the ills of society: “As to public affairs; they are most
alarming ... The [Prince Regent] seems neither respected or beloved; and the lower orders
have been for upwards of thirty years accumulating in pestilential masses of ignorant
population; the effects now begin to show themselves. ...” These words are remarkable in
light of Wordsworth’s early identification with just such “masses of population,” though it is
evident even in the preface that he had already begun to represent “the lower orders” as
fundamentally removed from the affairs of both state and the arts. This belief is extraordinary
considering the faith he had expressed in “the people” in “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff.”
 Even before the publication of the first edition in 1798, Wordsworth was certainly aware that
the poems in Lyrical Ballads were different from the conventional verse of the day, and he
knew that fashionable reviewers would probably dismiss them as insufficiently elevated in
tone and subject matter. They did, with a vengeance, and a good part of Wordsworth’s
additions to the preface for the 1802 edition are attempts to answer his critics. But even in the
1800 version of the preface Wordsworth made an explicit connection between a plain poetic
diction and a proper relationship to nature and society; that is, he makes the issue of a poetic
diction a moral one, and his critique of a sonnet by Thomas Gray is an ethical demonstration
as well as an example of literary criticism directed by one generation against the preceding
one. As Wordsworth revised the preface for later editions, the changes reflected
Wordsworth’s increasingly conservative views.
 By December 1799 William and Dorothy Wordsworth were living in Dove Cottage, at Town
End, Grasmere. With financial prospects, Wordsworth married Mary Hutchinson on October
2, 1802. The settlement helped to support a growing family and also allowed the
Wordsworths to continue their generosity to various friends and men of letters, many of
whom came to stay at Dove Cottage, sometimes for months on end. The death of the earl of
Lonsdale also marked the beginning of a close economic and political relationship between
William Wordsworth and Sir William Lowther (who became earl of Lonsdale in 1807) that
would have a significant effect on the poet’s political philosophy in the years to come.
 Wordsworth continued to write poetry with energy and passion over the next several years,
and while fashionable critics such as Francis Jeffrey continued to snipe, his reputation and
finances slowly improved. During these years he composed “The Solitary Reaper,”
“Resolution and Independence,” and “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” perhaps the greatest
lyrics of his maturity. In these poems Wordsworth presents a fully developed, yet morally
flexible, picture of the relationship between human beings and the natural world. Influenced
by Neoplatonism, these poems also prepare the way for Wordsworth’s return to conventional
religious belief. In 1805 Wordsworth completed a massive revision of the “poem to
Coleridge” that would be published, after undergoing periodic adjustment and revision, after
the poet’s death in 1850. Many critics believe that the “1805 Prelude,” as it has come to be
called, is Wordsworth’s greatest poetic achievement.
 In May 1808, his “great decade” behind him, Wordsworth moved with his family to Allan
Bank, a larger house in Grasmere. Thomas De Quincy took over Dove Cottage. Evidence of a
decisive turn in Wordsworth’s social and political views—and, by extension, his poetical
views as well—during this period is to be found in The Convention of Cintra (1809), an
extended political tract concerning the British expedition to Portugal to fight against
Napoleon’s forces encamped on the Spanish peninsula. In 1793 Wordsworth had written in
his “Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff,” “In France royalty is no more.” In 1808 he might have
said “In William Wordsworth, Jacobinism is no more.” In place of Wordsworth’s early belief
 in equality, The Convention of Cintra presents a narrowly patriotic and nationalist view of
European politics and a profoundly reactionary political philosophy expressed in tortured
rhetoric.
 Throughout The Convention of Cintra Wordsworth seems to have given himself over to rigid
abstractions such as Patriotism, Justice, and Power, and it is possible to argue that the
diminution of Wordsworth’s poetic power dates from this period. If “A Letter to the Bishop
of Llandaff” was derivative of Godwin, The Convention of Cintra is certainly derivative of
Edmund Burke. When Henry Crabb Robinson showed a copy of Wordsworth’s pamphlet to
Thomas Quayle, Quayle said that Wordsworth’s style resembled the worst of Burke’s. The
radical republican of 1793 has by this point adopted not only Burke’s style but the essence of
his thought as well. The transformation of his ideas seems to have cost Wordsworth his clarity
of language, so apparent in “A Letter to the Bishop of Llandaff,” and even the “Preface to
Lyrical Ballads,” which, though structurally complicated, is never obscure in the way of The
Convention of Cintra.
 On Wednesday evening, December 2, 1812, William Wordsworth wrote to his friend Robert
Southey about the death of Thomas Wordsworth, the poet’s six-year-old son, the previous
day. The simplicity and directness of this letter communicate Wordsworth’s sorrow with great
power and integrity.
 Thomas was the second child of William and Mary Wordsworth to die in childhood.
Catherine had died the previous June, a few months before her fourth birthday.
 In late 1812 Lord Lonsdale proposed that he provide 100 pounds a year for the support of
Wordsworth and his family until a salaried position became available. Wordsworth was at
first somewhat reluctant to accept the patronage, but he accepted, and on January 8, 1813 he
wrote to acknowledge receipt of payment. He was relieved when the post of Distributor of
Stamps was offered to him a few months later. With this assurance of economic security, the
Wordsworths moved to Rydal Mount, the poet’s final home, in May 1813. Lonsdale’s gift and
patronage marked a deepening of the relations between the aristocratic earl and the formerly
radical republican and supporter of revolution in France and democracy in England.
Politically, Wordsworth had completely transformed himself; poetically, he repeated earlier
formulas and began rearranging his poems in a seemingly infinite sequence of thematically
organized volumes.
 Other than letters and miscellaneous notes, Wordsworth’s political prose writings conclude
with Two Addresses to the Freeholders of Westmoreland (1818). These have been described
by one critic as “nearly unreadable,” but they are crucial to an understanding of Wordsworth’s
entanglement in local and national politics. By this time, Wordsworth had come to believe
that the only way to preserve the virtues celebrated in “Michael” and other early poems was
to maintain the traditional social orders of English society. Fully the Tory mouthpiece,
Wordsworth argued that the Whigs had put too much faith in human nature, as they (and he)
did at the commencement of the French Revolution. The Two Addresses praise Edmund
Burke for just those values Wordsworth had earlier excoriated. By this time Wordsworth had
fully incorporated Burke’s system of beliefs into his own, and several passages of the 1850
Prelude are redolent with Burkean sentimental and political philosophy.
 Wordsworth’s last major work in prose represents a return to his earliest interest in the land
and scenery of the English Lake District. In 1810 artist Joseph Wilkinson published Select
Views in Cumberland, Westmoreland, and Lancashire , with an introduction by Wordsworth.
In 1822 Wordsworth returned to his introduction, expanding it into a book most commonly
known as A Guide through the District of the Lakes, which continues to be republished in a
variety of editions. Wordsworth’s love of his native region is evident in the Guide, which
remains useful for the reader of Wordsworth’s poetry as well as for the tourist of the Lake
District.
 In 1843 Wordsworth was named poet laureate of England, though by this time he had for the
most part quit composing verse. He revised and rearranged his poems, published various
editions, and entertained literary guests and friends. When he died in 1850, he had for some
years been venerated as a sage, his most ardent detractors glossing over the radical origins of
his poetics and politics.
Key Poem Information

Central Message: Nature is incredibly impactful and highly important to one's understanding of the
world.

Themes: Beauty, Nature Speaker: Wordsworth Emotions Evoked: Contentment, Enjoyment

Poetic Form: Quatrain Time Period: 19th Century

Poem:
I heard a thousand blended notes,While in a grove I sate reclined,In that sweet mood when pleasant
thoughtsBring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature linkThe human soul that through me ran;And much it grieved my heart
to thinkWhat man has made of man.

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;And ’tis my faith that
every flowerEnjoys the air it breathes.

The birds around me hopped and played,Their thoughts I cannot measure:—But the least motion
which they madeIt seemed a thrill of pleasure.

The budding twigs spread out their fan,To catch the breezy air;And I must think, do all I can,That
there was pleasure there.

If this belief from heaven be sent,If such be Nature’s holy plan,Have I not reason to lamentWhat man
has made of man?

 In 1798, William Wordsworth, poet of ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, was to publish a
volume of poetry known as ‘Lyrical Ballads‘ with his then-friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
In 1802, they published this volume again, this time with a preface written by William
Wordsworth himself, wherein he attempted to explain the reasoning for writing his poetry. He
wrote, ‘what is a Poet? He is a man speaking to men’, a movement away from an idealized
notion of the poet having some higher aim in life and some God-ordained talent to write to
educate others.
  Lines Written in Early Spring‘ by William Wordsworth is a landscape poem that is largely
concerned with nature. The unnamed narrator lounges underneath a tree in the wilderness and
contemplates the changes that society has undergone around him.
 As the poet sits there and muses on nature, its beauty, and its seamless existence, his thoughts
turn briefly to the misery of man, and to the miseries that they wrought on each other. At the
time of writing, the French Revolution was raging through France, a cultural shock that was
to provide the British literary society with enough fodder to last them for years – and William
Wordsworth was no exception to the rule. Stunned by the cruelty and the callousness of
French society, he and other Romantics wrote primarily to try and take back the world from
the brink that it had been pushed to during the so-called age of enlightenment. ‘Lines Written
in Early Spring’ was one such poem.

Themes
Wordsworth’s themes in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ are nature, spirituality, and peace.
Throughout this poem, the poet, who is very likely the speaker, observes the natural world around
him. he discusses how impactful the images of nature are on his state of mind. he was in a “sweet
mood”. But, this pleasant mood leads him to deeper thoughts, those associated with the nature of
humankind, and what has become of the human soul/spirit. He mourns over what man has done to
man in the face of Nature which contains all of us. The speaker knows that although he doesn’t have
answers to many of his questions he can take pleasure from the world around him.

Structure
‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ is a six stanza poem that is separated into sets of four lines, known as
quatrains. These quatrains follow a simple and mostly consistent rhyme scheme of ABAB, changing
end sounds from stanza to stanza. There are a few moments in which the rhymes are closer to half-
rhymes than full. For example, “notes” and “thoughts” in the first stanza.
In regards to the meter, Wordsworth uses iambic tetrameter in the first three lines of each stanza and
then transitions into iambic trimeter in the final, fourth line of each stanza. The first three lines of each
stanza all contain (there are a few moments where the stresses are up for interpretation or transition
stresses) four sets of two beats. The first of these is unstressed and the second is stressed. The final
stanza loses one metrical foot meaning that it only contains three sets of two beats.
Literary Devices
Wordsworth makes use of several literary devices in ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’. These include
but are not limited to alliteration, enjambment, and imagery. The latter is perhaps the most important
technique at work in the poem. it can be seen from the first line to the last. The poet taps into a variety
of human senses in order to accurately and vividly depict the landscape he’s seeing.
Alliteration and enjambment are important and common techniques in poetry. The first can be seen
through the repetition of the same sound at the beginning of multiple lines. For example, “sweet” and
“sad” in lines three and four of the first stanza.
Enjambment can be seen in the transition between lines one and two of the second stanza as well as
lines three and four of the fourth stanza.
Analysis, Stanza by Stanza
Stanza One
I heard a thousand blended notes,
While in a grove I sate reclined,
In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts
Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

 Wordsworth has a renowned reputation as the poet of nature. In his body of work, Nature
assumes a personality, an almost divine spirit that permeates all objects. To be close to nature,
Wordsworth philosophized, was to be close to God; and while there were other poems of
nature that were prevalent throughout the Romantic era, it is Wordsworth who springs most
readily to mind.
 In the first quatrain, the divinity of Nature occurs in the phrase ‘a thousand blended notes’,
implying an almost-pervasive presence of the natural, something that is akin to the
omnipotence shown by God.

Stanza Two
To her fair works did Nature link
The human soul that through me ran;
And much it grieved my heart to think
What man has made of man.

 The second quatrain moves briefly away from Nature to reminisce on the misery that other
humans have caused each other since time immemorial. The poet, however, takes a moment
to state that Nature is linked to humanity through the very idea of a soul; that Nature’s soul is
not that different from humanity, and that, although it has been forgotten by the rest of the
world, it is man’s natural state to be close to Nature. This was one of Wordsworth’s principle
philosophies: that it was man’s innate state to be close to nature.

Stanza Three
Through primrose tufts, in that green bower,
The periwinkle trailed its wreaths;
And ’tis my faith that every flower
Enjoys the air it breathes.

 In this quatrain, the presence of nature as a living thing strikes again, this time in the
movement verbs used – ‘trailed’, for the periwinkle; ‘breathes’ for the flowers. Throughout
‘Lines Written in Early Spring’, Wordsworth does his best to create the idea of a living,
breathing world that is only a fraction removed from humanity.
Stanza Four
The birds around me hopped and played,
Their thoughts I cannot measure:—
But the least motion which they made
It seemed a thrill of pleasure.

 Once more, the presence of movement draws a stark contrast with the immobile poet – it is
nature that draws the reader’s attention, so much has been said about it that it renders the
speaker-poet nearly a non-entity. He has no presence in the poem; no thoughts, no
personality, no ideas. His world is subsumed by the stronger one of nature.

Stanzas Five and Six

The budding twigs spread out their fan,
To catch the breezy air;
And I must think, do all I can,
That there was pleasure there.
If this belief from heaven be sent,
If such be Nature’s holy plan,
Have I not reason to lament
What man has made of man?

 Wordsworth ends ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ with the same lament that was mentioned
earlier: ‘have I not reason to lament /what man has made of man?’ Throughout the poem,
there was the attempt by Nature to heal the injured soul of the poet-speaker; near the end,
despite the best efforts of Nature herself, the poet-speaker’s spirits are still melancholy and
low thus negating the healing effect that Wordsworth claimed nature possessed. It ends on a
somber, sad note; the world of nature, untouched by the miseries of humanity, continues on
while the human soul, bound in its rigid cage of mortality and reason, is left behind to
experience the misery of the human world.

Historical Background
Wordsworth wrote ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’ on a walk near the village of Alford. Wordsworth
was an ardent walker, and often composed his poems on the move, or wrote them about the scenes of
nature that he witnessed.
He supported the French Revolution and had concerns about the way that civilization was going, and
the things that humans were doing to each other.

Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth’s ‘Lyrical Ballads’ was received well, and the reviews mostly erred on the side of
positive, but it was only in the later years that ‘Lyrical Ballads’ reached the acclaim of being the first
published volume in the changing face of British literature and the herald to English Romanticism.
In the preface to the 1802 ‘Lyrical Ballads,’ Wordsworth wrote:
The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from
common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of
language really used by men, and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of
imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and,
further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly
though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in
which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.

Similar Poetry
Wordsworth wrote many other poems that could be counted as similar in imagery and themes to this
one. Nature was one of the major focuses of his poetic work as it was and still is of many other poets.
Readers can also enjoy Wordsworth’s poems such as:

 ‘It is a Beauteous Evening, Calm and Free’

 ‘My Heart Leaps Up’
Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken

Poet:

 Robert Frost was born in San Francisco, but his family moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, in
1884 following his father’s death. The move was actually a return, for Frost’s ancestors were
originally New Englanders, and Frost became famous for his poetry’s engagement with New
England locales, identities, and themes. Frost graduated from Lawrence High School, in 1892,
as class poet and two years later, the New York Independent accepted his poem entitled “My
Butterfly,” launching his status as a professional poet with a check. Frost's first book was
published around the age of 40, but he would go on to win a record four Pulitzer Prizes and
become the most famous poet of his time, before his death at the age of 88.

 To celebrate his first publication, Frost had a book of six poems privately printed; two copies
of Twilight were made—one for himself and one for his fiancee. Over the next eight years,
however, he succeeded in having only 13 more poems published. During this time, Frost
sporadically attended Dartmouth and Harvard and earned a living teaching school and, later,
working a farm in Derry, New Hampshire. But in 1912, discouraged by American magazines’
constant rejection of his work, he took his family to England, where he found more
professional success. Continuing to write about New England, he had two books published, A
Boy’s Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), which established his reputation so that his
return to the United States in 1915 was as a celebrated literary figure. Holt put out an
American edition of North of Boston in 1915, and periodicals that had once scorned his work
now sought it.

 Frost’s position in American letters was cemented with the publication of North of Boston,
and in the years before his death he came to be considered the unofficial poet laureate of the
United States. On his 75th birthday, the US Senate passed a resolution in his honor which
said, “His poems have helped to guide American thought and humor and wisdom, setting
forth to our minds a reliable representation of ourselves and of all men.”
 In 1955, the State of Vermont named a mountain after him in Ripton, the town of his legal
residence; and at the presidential inauguration of John F. Kennedy in 1961, Frost was given
the unprecedented honor of being asked to read a poem. Frost wrote a poem called
“Dedication” for the occasion, but could not read it given the day’s harsh sunlight. He instead
recited “The Gift Outright,” which Kennedy had originally asked him to read, with a revised,
more forward-looking, last line.

 Though Frost allied himself with no literary school or movement, the imagists helped at the
start to promote his American reputation. Poetry: A Magazine of Verse published his work
before others began to clamor for it. It also published a review by Ezra Pound of the British
 edition of A Boy’s Will, which Pound said “has the tang of the New Hampshire woods, and it
has just this utter sincerity.
 This man has the good sense to speak naturally and to paint the thing, the thing as he sees it.”
Amy Lowell reviewed North of Boston in the New Republic, and she, too, sang Frost’s
praises: “He writes in classic metres in a way to set the teeth of all the poets of the older
schools on edge; and he writes in classic metres, and uses inversions and cliches whenever he
pleases, those devices so abhorred by the newest generation. He goes his own way, regardless
of anyone else’s rules, and the result is a book of unusual power and sincerity.” In these first
two volumes, Frost introduced not only his affection for New England themes and his unique
blend of traditional meters and colloquialism, but also his use of dramatic monologues and
dialogues. “Mending Wall,” the leading poem in North of Boston, describes the friendly
argument between the speaker and his neighbor as they walk along their common wall
replacing fallen stones; their differing attitudes toward “boundaries” offer symbolic
significance typical of the poems in these early collections.

 Mountain Interval marked Frost’s turn to another kind of poem, a brief meditation sparked by
an object, person or event. Like the monologues and dialogues, these short pieces have a
dramatic quality. “Birches,” discussed above, is an example, as is “The Road Not Taken,” in
which a fork in a woodland path transcends the specific. The distinction of this volume, the
Boston Transcript said, “is that Mr. Frost takes the lyricism of A Boy’s Will and plays a
deeper music and gives a more intricate variety of experience.”

 Several new qualities emerged in Frost’s work with the appearance of New Hampshire
(1923), particularly a new self-consciousness and willingness to speak of himself and his art.
The volume, for which Frost won his first Pulitzer Prize, “pretends to be nothing but a long
poem with notes and grace notes,” as Louis Untermeyer described it. The title poem,
approximately fourteen pages long, is a “rambling tribute” to Frost’s favorite state and “is
starred and dotted with scientific numerals in the manner of the most profound treatise.”
Thus, a footnote at the end of a line of poetry will refer the reader to another poem seemingly
inserted to merely reinforce the text of “New Hampshire.” Some of these poems are in the
form of epigrams, which appear for the first time in Frost’s work. “Fire and Ice,” for example,
one of the better known epigrams, speculates on the means by which the world will end.
Frost’s most famous and, according to J. McBride Dabbs, most perfect lyric, “Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening,” is also included in this collection; conveying “the insistent
whisper of death at the heart of life,” Frost himself said of this poem that it is the kind he’d
like to print on one page followed with “forty pages of footnotes.”
 West-Running Brook (1928), Frost’s fifth book of poems, is divided into six sections, one of
which is taken up entirely by the title poem. This poem refers to a brook which perversely
flows west instead of east to the Atlantic like all other brooks. A comparison is set up
between the brook and the poem’s speaker who trusts himself. Frost’s stoic theme of
resistance and self-realization. Reviewing the collection in the New York Herald Tribune,
Babette Deutsch wrote: “The courage that is bred by a dark sense of Fate, the tenderness that
 broods over mankind in all its blindness and absurdity, the vision that comes to rest as fully
on kitchen smoke and lapsing snow as on mountains and stars—these are his, and in his
seemingly casual poetry, he quietly makes them ours.”

 A Further Range (1936), which earned Frost another Pulitzer Prize and was a Book-of-the-
Month Club selection, contains two groups of poems subtitled “Taken Doubly” and “Taken
Singly.” In the first, and more interesting, of these groups, the poems are somewhat didactic,
though there are humorous and satiric pieces as well.
 Most critics acknowledge that Frost’s poetry in the 1940s and '50s grew more and more
abstract, cryptic, and even sententious, so it is generally on the basis of his earlier work that
he is judged. His politics and religious faith, hitherto informed by skepticism and local color,
became more and more the guiding principles of his work. He had been, as Randall Jarrell
points out, “a very odd and very radical radical when young” yet became “sometimes
callously and unimaginatively conservative” in his old age. He had become a public figure,
and in the years before his death, much of his poetry was written from this stance.

 Reviewing A Witness Tree (1942) in Books, Wilbert Snow noted a few poems “which have a
right to stand with the best things he has written”: “Come In,” “The Silken Tent,” and “Carpe
Diem” especially. Yet Snow went on: “Some of the poems here are little more than rhymed
fancies; others lack the bullet-like unity of structure to be found in North of Boston.” On the
other hand, Stephen Vincent Benet felt that Frost had “never written any better poems than
some of those in this book.” Similarly, critics were let down by In the Clearing (1962). One
wrote, “Although this reviewer considers Robert Frost to be the foremost contemporary U.S.
poet, he regretfully must state that most of the poems in this new volume are disappointing. ...
[They] often are closer to jingles than to the memorable poetry we associate with his name.”
Another maintained that “the bulk of the book consists of poems of ‘philosophic talk.’
Whether you like them or not depends mostly on whether you share the ‘philosophy.’”

 Indeed, many readers do share Frost’s philosophy, and still others who do not nevertheless
continue to find delight and significance in his large body of poetry. In October, 1963,
President John F. Kennedy delivered a speech at the dedication of the Robert Frost Library in
Amherst, Massachusetts. This was the special significance of Robert Frost.” The poet would
probably have been pleased by such recognition, for he had said once, in an interview with
Harvey Breit: “One thing I care about, and wish young people could care about, is taking
poetry as the first form of understanding. If poetry isn’t understanding all, the whole world,
then it isn’t worth anything.”

 Frost’s poetry is revered to this day. When a previously unknown poem by Frost titled “War
Thoughts at Home,” was discovered and dated to 1918, it was subsequently published in the
Fall 2006 issue of the Virginia Quarterly Review. The first edition Frost’s Notebooks were
published in 2009, and thousands of errors were corrected in the paperback edition years later.
A critical edition of his Collected Prose was published in 2010 to broad critical acclaim. A
 multi-volume series of his Collected Letters is now in production, with the first volume
appearing in 2014 and the second in 2016.
 Robert Frost continues to hold a unique and almost isolated position in American letters.
“Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him
as anything other than a modern poet,” writes James M. Cox, “it is difficult to place him in
the main tradition of modern poetry.” In a sense, Frost stands at the crossroads of 19th-
century American poetry and modernism, for in his verse may be found the culmination of
many 19th-century tendencies and traditions as well as parallels to the works of his 20th-
century contemporaries. Taking his symbols from the public domain, Frost developed, as
many critics note, an original, modern idiom and a sense of directness and economy that
reflect the imagism of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. On the other hand, as Leonard Unger
and William Van O’Connor point out in Poems for Study, “Frost’s poetry, unlike that of such
contemporaries as Eliot, Stevens, and the later Yeats, shows no marked departure from the
poetic practices of the nineteenth century.” Although he avoids traditional verse forms and
only uses rhyme erratically, Frost is not an innovator and his technique is never experimental.

 Frost’s theory of poetic composition ties him to both centuries. Like the 19th-century
Romantic poets, he maintained that a poem is “never a put-up job. ... It begins as a lump in
the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a loneliness. It is never a thought to begin with.
It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness.” Yet, “working out his own version of the
‘impersonal’ view of art,” as Hyatt H. Waggoner observed, Frost also upheld T.S. Eliot’s idea
that the man who suffers and the artist who creates are totally separate. In a 1932 letter to
Sydney Cox, Frost explained his conception of poetry: “The objective idea is all I ever cared
about. Most of my ideas occur in verse. ... To be too subjective with what an artist has
managed to make objective is to come on him presumptuously and render ungraceful what he
in pain of his life had faith he had made graceful.”

 To accomplish such objectivity and grace, Frost took up 19th-century tools and made them
new. Lawrance Thompson has explained that, according to Frost, “the self-imposed
restrictions of meter in form and of coherence in content” work to a poet’s advantage; they
liberate him from the experimentalist’s burden—the perpetual search for new forms and
alternative structures. Thus Frost, as he himself put it in “The Constant Symbol,” wrote his
verse regular; he never completely abandoned conventional metrical forms for free verse, as
so many of his contemporaries were doing. At the same time, his adherence to meter, line
length, and rhyme scheme was not an arbitrary choice. He maintained that “the freshness of a
poem belongs absolutely to its not having been thought out and then set to verse as the verse
in turn might be set to music.” He believed, rather, that the poem’s particular mood dictated
or determined the poet’s “first commitment to metre and length of line.”

 Critics frequently point out that Frost complicated his problem and enriched his style by
setting traditional meters against the natural rhythms of speech. Drawing his language
primarily from the vernacular, he avoided artificial poetic diction by employing the accent of
 a soft-spoken New Englander. In The Function of Criticism, Yvor Winters faulted Frost for
his “endeavor to make his style approximate as closely as possible the style of conversation.”
He wanted to restore to literature the “sentence sounds that underlie the words,” the “vocal
gesture” that enhances meaning. That is, he felt the poet’s ear must be sensitive to the voice in
order to capture with the written word the significance of sound in the spoken word. “The
Death of the Hired Man,” for instance, consists almost entirely of dialogue between Mary and
Warren, her farmer-husband, but critics have observed that in this poem Frost takes the
prosaic patterns of their speech and makes them lyrical. To Ezra Pound “The Death of the
Hired Man” represented Frost at his best—when he “dared to write ... in the natural speech of
New England; in natural spoken speech, which is very different from the ‘natural’ speech of
the newspapers, and of many professors.”

 Frost’s use of New England dialect is only one aspect of his often discussed regionalism.
Within New England, his particular focus was on New Hampshire, which he called “one of
the two best states in the Union,” the other being Vermont. In an essay entitled “Robert Frost
and New England: A Revaluation,” W.G. O’Donnell noted how from the start, in A Boy’s
Will, “Frost had already decided to give his writing a local habitation and a New England
name, to root his art in the soil that he had worked with his own hands.” Reviewing North of
Boston in the New Republic, Amy Lowell wrote, “Not only is his work New England in
subject, it is so in technique. ... Mr. Frost has reproduced both people and scenery with a
vividness which is extraordinary.” Many other critics have lauded Frost’s ability to
realistically evoke the New England landscape; they point out that one can visualize an
orchard in “After Apple-Picking” or imagine spring in a farmyard in “Two Tramps in Mud
Time.” In this “ability to portray the local truth in nature,” O’Donnell claims, Frost has no
peer. The same ability prompted Pound to declare, “I know more of farm life than I did before
I had read his poems. That means I know more of ‘Life.’”

 Yet, just as Frost is aware of the distances between one man and another, so he is also always
aware of the distinction, the ultimate separateness, of nature and man. Marion Montgomery
has explained, “His attitude toward nature is one of armed and amicable truce and mutual
respect interspersed with crossings of the boundaries” between individual man and natural
forces. Below the surface of Frost’s poems are dreadful implications, what Rosenthal calls his
“shocked sense of the helpless cruelty of things.” This natural cruelty is at work in “Design”
and in “Once by the Pacific.” The ominous tone of these two poems prompted Rosenthal’s
further comment: “At his most powerful Frost is as staggered by ‘the horror’ as Eliot and
approaches the hysterical edge of sensibility in a comparable way. ... His is still the modern
mind in search of its own meaning.”

 The austere and tragic view of life that emerges in so many of Frost’s poems is modulated by
his metaphysical use of detail. As Frost portrays him, man might be alone in an ultimately
 indifferent universe, but he may nevertheless look to the natural world for metaphors of his
own condition.
 Thus, in his search for meaning in the modern world, Frost focuses on those moments when
the seen and the unseen, the tangible and the spiritual intersect. John T. Napier calls this
Frost’s ability “to find the ordinary a matrix for the extraordinary.” In this respect, he is often
compared with Emily Dickinson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, in whose poetry, too, a simple
fact, object, person, or event will be transfigured and take on greater mystery or significance.
The poem “Birches” is an example: it contains the image of slender trees bent to the ground
temporarily by a boy’s swinging on them or permanently by an ice-storm. But as the poem
unfolds, it becomes clear that the speaker is concerned not only with child’s play and natural
phenomena, but also with the point at which physical and spiritual reality merge.

 Such symbolic import of mundane facts informs many of Frost’s poems, and in “Education by
Poetry” he explained: “Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, ‘grace’
metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one
permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. ... Unless you are at home in the
metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not
safe anywhere.”
Poem:

Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ is about the choices and opportunities in life. The poem
highlights the sensation of regret that accompanies all the roads that a person doesn’t take.
Key Poem Information
Central Message: Choices we make have lasting consequences (although written as a joke for fellow
poet Edward Thomas) Themes: Disappointment, Journey, Nature Speaker: Robert Frost Emotions
Evoked: Confusion, Hope, Hopelessness, Worry Poetic Form: Narrative Time Period:
20th Century

'The Road Not Taken' is a timeless masterpiece that inspires readers to reflect on life's
choices and the path they choose to take.

 ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost is quite a popular poem; unfortunately, however, its
popularity comes mainly from the simple act of misreading. With this poem, Frost has given
the world a piece of writing that every individual can relate to, especially when it comes to
the concept of choices and opportunities in life.
 A majority of the time, this poem is quoted and used with an interpretation that is not exactly
“correct”. The popular belief is that Frost meant for this poem to be about hope, success, and
defying the odds by choosing a path well, “less traveled by.” On the other hand, if the poem is
reviewed, it is quite obvious that it has fairly the opposite connotation.

 It is Robert Frost’s first poem in his book “Mountain Interval” (1916). A popular, pleasantly
misconstrued poem since its release, its simplicity and way with words demonstrate the skill
of Frost’s pen.

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I
stood And looked down one as far as I couldTo 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 thereHad worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally layIn 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 sighSomewhere 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.
Summary
‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost describes how the speaker struggles to choose between two
roads diverging in the yellowish woods on an autumn morning.
In the poem, the individual arrives at a critical juncture in his life, arriving at crossroads at last near “a
yellow wood.” As per him, the paths are equally well-traversed and yield anonymous outcomes. The
individual comforts with a thought about returning, be if his path is unsuitable for him, yet in
hindsight, he’s aware of the futility of such thought. Since his current path will bring upon separate
paths in itself, disallowing any consequent reversal. The individual concludes on a melancholic note
of how different circumstances and outcomes would have been, had it been the “other” path.

Meaning
Robert Frost’s poetic masterpiece is arguably the most infamously misunderstood poem as of yet.
Marrying elements of form and content, arresting artistic phraseology and metaphors, the poem is
mostly read without being understood. The archetypal conundrum is the primary attraction of the
poem, readers instantly relate to their personal experiences.
Forks and woods are used as metaphorical devices relating to decisions and crises. Similar forks are
representative of everlasting struggle against fate and free will. Since humans are free to select as per
their will, their fate is unknown to them.
‘The Road Not Taken’ actually steers clear of advising on selecting a definitive path. Frost’s take on
this is slightly complicated. The grassy roads and yellow woods represent the present as the individual
views from a future perspective. This self-realization is pathetic and ironic in itself. The future self
will regret first his decision about taking the road less traveled on. In hindsight, his regret is
everlasting in this case point.

Detailed Analysis

Stanza One
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;

‘A Road Not Taken’ opens with strong imagery, because of the diction used to depict two physical
roads separating from each other in “a yellow wood.” It is observably a forest that is showcasing the
colors of autumn.
Line two is hasty to display the theme of regret, by revealing that the individual is “sorry” before he
even decides which road to take. We basically find ourselves observing a very important moment,
where he has to make a decision that is evidently difficult for him.
Lines three through five, express that the individual is trying to see as far as he can down each road, to
help him decide which one he should choose to take.
Lines 1–2
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both

The first two lines of this stanza introduce the dilemma that every human faces, not once, but multiple
times in his or her life; the dilemma of choice. We as people go through many circumstances and
experiences in our lives, and one of them is choosing between two (or more) paths.
This is experienced literally: in the roads we take and the routes we walk daily, and figuratively: when
we come to points in our lives where we must make decisions for our next steps, based on the
opportunities presented to us. And like the character in ‘The Road Not Taken,’ oftentimes, we are
disappointed that we cannot hold on to, and experience the consequences of every opportunity that is
presented to us. In order to gain some things in life, we must let others go.

Lines 3–5
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

By having the character in the poem examine the roads ahead of him, Frost is emphasizing that we all
try our best to guess what lays ahead for us in every opportunity that we are presented in an attempt to
find some control and later comfort over our final decisions. We like to take our time in order to make
informed decisions so we can justify our choices when the regret of missing out on the other “roads”
starts to haunt us.

Stanza Two
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,

In this second stanza, lines six through eight: the individual in ‘The Road Not Taken’ finally makes a
decision and chooses a road that he thinks and believes is better, because it looked like not many
people had walked on it before.
However, in lines nine and ten, he is quick to add that the other road looked equally used in
comparison to the one he chose, so it really was not as less traveled as he was telling himself.
Lines 6–7
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,

These lines are important because they clarify the common misunderstanding that one road was less
traveled than the other since the character clearly states that both roads were “really about the same.”
The diction in this stanza portrays the uncertainty of the character as he tries to justify to himself that
his decision is the right one for him; and much like anyone else, he is trying to realistically weigh the
outcomes of both roads.

Lines 8–10
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

The important idea to note in these lines is that the character claimed the road he chose was better
because it “wanted wear” meaning that it was tempting him. He felt that the road he chose “wanted”
to be walked on by him. This underlines the nature of people in general, that we will always choose
the path which seems attractive and is of interest to us, even if both paths have the equal potential of
getting us to wherever it is we are headed.
That said the word “want” has historically been used to represent a lack of something. For example
“the house was in want of repair” so perhaps the suggestion here is that the path is overgrown because
it is less travelled.
Either way no matter where we end up, and how informed, tempting, and satisfying our choices are,
we will always wonder about the “what ifs” and the “could have beens” of the other opportunities
that we left behind.

Stanza Three
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.

In the third stanza, Robert Frost mentions in lines eleven and twelve that at the moment that this
individual was making his decision, both paths were nearly identical. No one had stepped through to
disturb the leaves on both roads.
Line thirteen is an important point in ‘The Road Not Taken’ as this is when the individual finalizes his
decision of leaving the other road, for perhaps another time.
Lines fourteen and fifteen give us a glimpse of his doubts. He honestly confesses to himself that it’s
highly unlikely he will come back to travel this other road because he knows as he moves forward he
will continue to find other paths taking him further and further away from this point, where he is
standing at the moment.

Lines 11–12
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

The lines show us that this character is truly being honest with himself, as he makes the crucial
decision of which road to take. His honesty is a reality check as well as a means of making a final
decision. He notices that both choices lay equally in front of him and none of these choices have been
“trodden black”.
Sometimes in life, when we reach a fork, we are able to make quick decisions based on what we
learned from other people’s experiences. These experiences then leave marks in the choices that we
have, these marks then form our bias towards or against that path. When we encounter choices in our
lives where we find that the leaves are not “trodden black” by what we learned from the people
around us, it becomes harder to decide between them, just like the situation of the character in ‘The
Road Not Taken’.

Lines 13–15
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

After making his decision, he exclaims that he will leave the first choice for another day. Then he
honestly tells himself that if he lets this road go now, there is no coming back. There are many
defining decisions in our life that shape our future and sometimes when we select an option in these
moments, they change the course of our life and there’s no turning back. That is where the regret of
not exploring our other options disturbs us.
Stanza Four
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.

In this last stanza, lines sixteen and seventeen, the individual predicts that one day far into the future,
he knows will tell the story of this decision that he is now making.
Lines eighteen and nineteen expose that he intends to lie and claim he took the less-traveled road. In
reality, both were equally traveled.
Finally, the last line expresses that the individual is also planning to claim that his choice to take this
less traveled road made all the difference, in where he will be standing at the time.

Lines 16–17
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:

These lines of the last stanza highlight the nature of our regrets. When it comes to tough decisions in
our lives, we always know that no matter what we finally choose, eventually, we will regret not being
able to try the possibility that was left uncharted by us.
In this stanza, the character is already imagining the regret he will feel and decides that he will not be
honest when he retells the story of his decision, as it will not validate his selection of the road if he
showcases his regret by stating that an equal opportunity could have landed him elsewhere in life.

Lines 18–20
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

He decides he will tell people he chose the road that was “less traveled by” to come across as a person
who took a chance and succeeded in life. In reality, the character is trying to convince himself that
when he shares his life experiences and distorts the truth, it will seem that taking this road “made all
the difference”.
This teaches readers that they never know where life will take them, so preplanning what the end of
the road looks like for themselves, and building regret is silly especially if they haven’t even started
the journey in the first place. Life is about the paths you do choose to walk through, not about
“the road not taken.”

Structure
Robert Frost has used an interesting style in ‘The Road Not Taken’. He works within the form, but at
times, the form works within his style. Using variation and his brand of words, Robert Frost’s poems
followed a unique composition. At times, he created forms to suit his poetry.
He has a general tendency to work within and without boundaries, carving memorable, identifiable,
and idiosyncratic poetry. In his early years, he perfected the art of “sound of sense”, bringing raw
sensory perception to a human mind. The sound of words forms imagery due to the form of words and
sound of sense.
Robert Frost has penned the poem in the first-person point of view. So, it’s a lyric poem. It comprises
five verses encapsulated in four stanzas. So, there are a total of 20 lines in the text.
Rhyme Scheme
This poem follows a set rhyme scheme. In each quintain, the rhyming convention employed is
ABAAB. It means that there are two sets of rhymes. The sound with which the first line ends occurs
again in the third and fourth lines. While the second and last lines rhyme together.
For example, let’s have a look at the rhyme scheme of the first stanza.
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
The same scheme is followed throughout the poem. There are no such exceptions.

Meter
Each line of this piece consists of nine syllables. Some lines contain a syllable more or less than the
average syllable count. While reading the text, the stress generally falls on the second syllable of each
foot. So, the overall poem is composed of iambic tetrameter. It means there are a total of four iambs in
every line. However, there are a few metrical variations as well.
Let’s take the first stanza and scan it metrically.
Two roads/ di-verged/ in a yel-/low wood,
And sor-/ry I/ could not tra-/vel both
And be/ one tra-/ve-ler, long/ I stood
And looked/ down one/ as far/ as I could
To where/ it bent/ in the un-/der-growth;
From the scansion of the first stanza, it is clear that Frost also uses a few anapests here and there
throughout the poem. There are a total of four feet in each line. As the majority of the feet are
composed of iambs, the dominant meter of this piece is the iambic tetrameter.

Literary Devices
Frost uses several literary devices in ‘The Road Not Taken’. To begin with, he uses anaphora in the
second, third, and fourth lines of the first stanza. Another important device of this piece is
enjambment. It can be seen in the third and fourth lines. Using this device, he maintains the flow in
between the lines as well as connects them internally.
Readers can find the use of metonymy in the phrase, “a yellow wood”. It refers to the season, autumn,
and its effect on nature. There is a symbol in the usage of the word, “undergrowth”. It stands for the
undiscovered regions of the future.
In the second stanza, readers can find the use of irony in this line, “And having perhaps the better
claim.” This device is explained further below. Apart from that, Frost uses alliteration in the phrase,
“wanted wear”.
The third stanza presents an inversion or hyperbaton in this line, “In leaves no step had trodden
black.” The line also contains a synecdoche. In the following line, readers can find a rhetorical
exclamation.
In the last stanza, the poet uses repetition for emphasizing a particular idea. For example, the phrase,
“ages and ages” emphasizes the continuity of life’s journey. While the repetition of the word, “I” in
the end and beginning of the third and fourth lines are meant for the sake of highlighting the speaker’s
hesitation. Such repetition is also known as anadiplosis. Lastly, the poem ends with a paradox.

Metaphor
Frost uses several metaphors in this poem to bring home his innovative ideas. For example, the title of
the poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’ contains a metaphor. In it, the “road” is a metaphor for the choice we
make.
Moving on to the text, there is another metaphor in the “yellow wood”. In this phrase, the poet
implicitly compares the idea of change to the yellowish wood. He compares the speaker of this piece
to a traveler who is struck while choosing the best option to carry on his journey.
Likewise, readers can find another metaphor in the last stanza. Here, the road “less traveled by” is a
metaphor for the choices less preferred by humans. It refers to unconventional things that pragmatic
society doesn’t follow at all. However, some people choose such unconventional options. So, in the
speaker’s case, he has not opted for the rarest choice.

Irony
The ironic undertone is inexorable. As he writes,
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
The individual anticipates insincerity in his future, looking in retrospect later on. He’s aware that he
will be far from correct and even hypocritical at times, looking at his life.
Furthermore, he is fully aware that his future self will ultimately deny his past self’s decision,
asserting it strongly. In essence, there’s no definitive true path here. As a result, what lies on the other
path may trouble an individual with remnant feelings of guilt afterward.
With ironic undertones throughout, the poem contains hints of remorse due to choosing a path without
much knowledge about either. Along the way, the individual wonders about the other path and what’s
irrevocably lost in deselecting it.

Imagery
The use of imagery, in this piece, makes it an interesting read. It helps readers to imagine the plot of
this poem. There is no unnecessary information in the text. Frost begins directly with the primary
image of the poem that is of the “two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” By using this visual imagery
filled with the color of autumn, the poet depicts the place where his speaker is struggling to make a
decision.
He further describes that the roads bent in the undergrowth. It means that the speaker cannot see what
is there ahead of the road. In this way, Frost paints a beautiful picture of two long roads going in two
different directions in the woods.
Readers can find more secondary details, integral to the main image, in the following stanzas.
According to the speaker, the roads more or less look the same. Grasses cover them and one of them
is less traveled than the other. Besides, some pale leaves are lying on the road. On one road, he can
see trodden, black leaves. While he cannot see such leaves on the other road.
Providing this description, Frost tries to depict two ideas through these images. The first idea is of the
choice that one can make easily by learning from the experience of others. Secondly, the image of the
less trodden road depicts a way that can be less traveled, but it is less discovered by others.

Tone and Mood

To understand the tone and mood of this poem, readers have to look for the words that have emotions
associated with them. One such word appears at the very beginning of the second line. The speaker
says, “sorry” for not being able to travel on both roads. How does this particular word influence the
poem’s tone and mood?
First of all, it tells readers that the speaker is not confident enough to make a decision. Therefore he
feels sorry for himself. It reflects his mental state as well as the poem’s mood that is a little bit drifting
towards the lethargic state of mind. Besides, the tone is emotive but not direct as it lacks confidence.
Another phrase, “long I stood” prolongs the mood of indecisiveness and confusion. The tone follows
the mood and it changes into an introspective one.
In the following stanza, the word “perhaps” in the second line depicts the tone of dilemma. The
confused mood of the speaker also confuses the readers. Moving on to the following stanzas, the
individual becomes comparably confident yet his tone reflects a sense of grief as he thinks the other
road might be better than the one he is about to walk on.

Symbolism
The infamous poem is rich with simplistic literal symbolism. Frost sets up a fictional stage for an
individual upon which he sets the direction of his life with irreparable consequences. It’s a metaphor
for people juggling with lifelong decisions. Seemingly an obvious poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’ has
been subjective, catering to multiple interpretations. According to Robert Frost himself:
You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem—very tricky.
In this piece, readers have to be aware of the use of symbols. The first dilemma that comes across
while reading the text is about the actual symbolic significance of the two roads. These roads do not
refer to two different paths. Rather Frost points at two superficially identical roads symbolizing the
choices a person has to make. He can only choose any one of them as it is literally impossible to be
“one traveler” on both roads. Besides, readers can find another symbol in “a yellow wood”. It refers to
the idea of change.

Themes
The thematic idea of ‘The Road Not Taken’ intrinsically lies in “carpe diem”, judging by its nuance.
In conventional carpe diem poems, readers can find that the speaker is urging one to seize the moment
and live in the present. Likewise, in this poem, the poet presents a person who is not sure about what
to do. He thinks about the future so he cannot make a decision based on the present scenario.
This piece also taps on several other themes such as choice, uncertainty, indecision, fate, and over-
thinking. The main theme of this piece is choice and uncertainty. In this poem, the speaker has to
make a choice and he is uncertain about the best one. He thinks what he will choose cannot be
suitable for him.
The next theme that can be found is indecision. Readers can find this theme in the lines such as,
“Then look at the other, as just as fair,/ And having perhaps the better claim.” Right after these lines,
the speaker says both of them are “really about the same.” That’s why he struggles with indecision.
It also seems that the speaker is a fatalist. He relies on it more than the present moment. This mindset
creates more confusion in his life. Last but not least is overthinking. This theme is present throughout
this piece. Here, the narrator has to make a simple decision. But, he thinks more than what is
necessary. It leads to all the confusion not only in his case but also in the case of readers.

Historical Context
Robert Frost‘s ‘The Road Not Taken’ depicts the poet or individual looking in retrospect and
contemplating upon past decisions. As per a biographical account by Lawrence Thompson, “Robert
Frost: The Years of Triumph”, the poem was based on his Welsh pal named Edward Thomas.
According to him, his friend was always regretful of his decision, irrespective of the road taken.
Considering himself as a regional poet, New England has been used as a recurring location in Robert
Frost’s poems. He moved to New Hampshire in his early teens. As a result, the rich culture, vivid
imagery, history, and landscape are reflected in his published work. Elements such as orchards,
forests, fields, and small towns are observed commonly. His narrators are often close to nature,
wandering in woods (Read ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’), in snowstorms, and picking
apples (Refer to ‘After Apple-Picking’).

What type of poem is ‘The Road Not Taken’?

It is a narrative poem as it tells a story of a speaker who was struggling to choose on a morning. This
poem also describes the mindset of the central character in metered verse. Besides, it is told from the
first-person point of view. So, it’s a lyric with a set rhyming and metrical scheme.
When was ‘The Road Not Taken’ written?

From 1912 to 1915, Robert Frost lived in England. There he developed a friendship with the poet
Edward Thomas. Often they went out for walks. One day, as they were walking they came across two
roads diverging in different directions. Thomas was indecisive about which way to take. In 1915,
when Frost returned to New Hampshire, he wrote the verses of ‘The Road Not Taken’ recounting this
event. He sent the copy to Thomas and it compelled him to get rid of his indecisiveness concerning
other things of his life.
Where was ‘The Road Not Taken’ published?

The poem was first published in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It was later
published in Frost’s poetry collection u0022Mountain Intervalu0022 (1916) as its first poem.
Why is the poem called ‘The Road Not Taken’?
The poem is titled, ‘The Road Not Taken’ for an interesting reason. In the poem, the road which is not
taken by the speaker is the one that is interestingly similar to the other road he takes. The poet
mentions the first road in the title for emphasizing the dominant thought of the speaker’s mind. If
there is only one road, there won’t be any problem. As there are two options, he struggles to make a
decision and suffers through prolonged indecisiveness. Even if he takes a path (may be suitable for
him), still he will be thinking of the other one. We often think in this pattern. So, the poet advises us
not to be engrossed in such thoughts.
What does “a yellow wood” symbolize in ‘The Road Not Taken’?

The phrase, “a yellow wood” symbolizes the abstract idea, change. It is also a symbol for the season,
Autumn. The roads diverged in the woods. So, it means that no matter what road the speaker takes,
there will be a change in his life. It is up to him how he reacts to it.
Is ‘The Road Not Taken’ about regret or appreciation?

‘The Road Not Taken’ is about regret. In a superficial reading, it may seem that the poet is
appreciating the speaker’s decision. But, analyzing the text thoroughly will reveal that the speaker
regrets the choice he makes even before its actual implementation.
Why did the poet doubt if he should ever come back?

The poetic persona doubts if he should ever come back or not. If he takes a road, he has to follow
wherever it takes. There will be ways that will lead him to other ways. In the process, he won’t have
enough time to return at this juncture and choose u0022the road not takenu0022.
Why did Robert Frost choose the road “less traveled”?

Robert Frost’s speaker chose the road less traveled as he had to make a decision. Otherwise, he would
get stuck at that place forever. So for the sake of continuing the journey of life, he took the other road,
less traveled by. He might do better on that way or it could prove futile. No matter what happened to
him, he had to make a decision.

Similar Poetry
Here is a list of a few poems that similarly showcase the themes present in Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The
Road Not Taken’.

 ‘Song of the Open Road‘ by Walt Whitman – It’s one of the best-known poems of Walt
Whitman. This poem describes a trip the speaker takes to learn about himself and enjoy the
journey to an unknown destination. Read more Walt Whitman poems.
 ‘There is Pleasure in the Pathless Woods’ by Lord Byron – It’s one of the best-loved poems
of Byron. This poem reflects a speaker’s strong desire for solitude and peace. Explore more
poems of Lord Byron.
 ‘The Road Goes Ever On’ by J.R.R. Tolkien – It’s among the popular poems of J.R.R.
Tolkien. This poem explores the themes of possibilities in life and hope. Read more J.R.R.
Tolkien poems.
 ‘The Way Through the Woods’ by Rudyard Kipling – It’s one of the best Rudyard Kipling
poems. This poem describes the changes that have come over one particular plot of forest.
Explore more poems by Rudyard Kipling.