Walking A Wilder Wonderside
When path led only from my door
to the pickety fence, choice easy then
but for a swing with old board floor,
a sky to hold a dream and more;
I chanced to see a forest glen.
Once old enough to step beyond
the sunken steps of plankard path
and summer green of lacy frond;
was tempted, then, betimes conned,
to trip full free of well-placed late.
Now, autumn is as fallen down
as any bar that stops my way;
those footsteps lost on sunken brown,
walk away with darkened frown
that I have chanced to go astray.
“I shall be telling this with a sigh”
to children who mind so very well
and forget to test a place nearby
for their near chance of touching sky
by walking wilder wonderside a spell.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
©Robert Frost-The Road Not Taken
Perhaps I choose to write this this poem because I fell in love with Frost in his walk through the woods. Perhaps it is because it rationalizes, for me, the reason I took the less traveled path. For whatever reason, I wish the world’s children step lightly and spritely to enter the world in wild and wonderful ways.
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