Lesson 8

Lesson Goals

Texts

Core

• • “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost, Poetry Foundation

Materials

Tools

• Analyzing Relationships Tool

• Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool

Reference Guides

• Academic Discussion Reference Guide
• Symbolism and Motifs Reference Guide

Question Sets

• What Does It Mean to Live a Life Well-Lived?: Section 1 Question Set

Editable Google Docs

• Analyzing Relationships Tool

• Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool

• What Does It Mean to Live a Life Well-Lived?: Section 1 Question Set

Activity 1: Discuss – Read

We will consider a question about life’s choices as an introduction to our reading of a famous poem by Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken.”

Step 1

As a class, discuss the idea that many of the texts we have read so far have involved personal stories—and choices made within those stories, often expressed metaphorically:

• Marge Piecy’s "To Be of Use": The choices made by people to "swim off with sure strokes," "harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart," and "go into the fields to harvest."

• Steve Jobs’s Commencement Address: His choices to leave college, "connect the dots," find Apple, then move on from that company.

• George Saunders’s "Advice to Graduates": His choices in response to his regret about "failures of kindness" earlier in his life.

• Naomi Shihab Nye’s "Kindness": Her choices to "journey through the night with plans," to travel by bus into South America, leading to her robbery, to her discovery of kindness in a stranger, and eventually to the poem itself.

• Denise Levertov’s "Sojourn in a Parallel World": The choices we make about how to live our lives and whether to acknowledge and live in the "parallel world" of nature.

• Annie Dillard’s "Living Like Weasels": Her choice to visit Hollins Pond and the choices she suggests we might make to "grasp your one necessity and not let it go."

Step 2

In light of this discussion, consider the following question:

1. How might you choose which roads to follow in your life?

Access a well-known poem by Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken."

Notice that this poem, unlike the three previously read, is a closed-form poem, written in four stanzas with patterned rhymes and rhythms.

Step 3

Follow along as the poem is read aloud, either by Robert Frost himself, your teacher, or a reader from the class. Listen for the patterns in its rhymes and rhythms while also visualizing the situation it is describing.

Activity 2: Read – Discuss

We will do an initial close reading of the poem on a literal level, considering general guiding questions about the setting and story Frost conveys through his use of language and description.

Step 1

As you study this poem, your reading, analysis, and discussion will be guided by a set of progressively more complex questions to help you dig into the poem and read it more closely. Access and review the question set for this activity. As selected by your teacher, discuss example questions from the set, what type they seem to be, and what kinds of details they might cause you to look for.

You will begin by reading the poem as a class and considering the first five questions of the Question Set.

1. What do the author’s words and phrases cause you to see, feel, or think? What images are coming to mind as you read the poem?

2. What seems to be the narrator’s attitude or point of view?

3. Overall, what do the poem’s details add up to—what happens in the story told by the narrator?

4. What do the verb tenses tell you about when the story happened?

5. What claims do you find in the poem—both stated and implied?

Step 2

Consider the first general guiding question from the Question Set:

1. What do the author’s words and phrases cause you to see, feel, or think? What images are coming to mind as you read the poem?

Individually, closely read of the poem, annotating key words or phrases that create a picture in your mind of a literal place, setting, and story.

In a class discussion, note examples of visual details and explain what is being literally depicted in the poem and what you visualize as you read it.

Note that, overall, the poem depicts a person’s experience during a walk in the woods and tells a story. Briefly summarize the story, again as literally depicted by the words and images in the poem.

Step 3

Focus the class discussion on the person who is telling the story (which might not be the poet himself). Consider the second guiding question:

2. What seems to be the narrator’s attitude or point of view?

Find and discuss details from the poem that seem to suggest how its storyteller views the events the poem depicts: the narrator’s perspective on the experience.

Step 4

Like many of the other texts we have read so far, "The Road Not Taken" presents a story that can be understood both literally and metaphorically.

Think about the story it presents by considering and discussing these text-specific questions:

3. Overall, what do the poem’s details add up to—what happens in the story told by the narrator?

4. What do the verb tenses tell you about when the story happened?

Note that these questions not only ask you to think about what the poem "adds up to" as a literal story but also to become aware of the passage of time reflected in its shifting verb tenses: from past to future.

Activity 3: Read – Discuss

We will examine the claims made by Frost in “The Road Not Taken,” both those explicitly stated and those implied within the poem.

Step 1

Review the discussions of claims you have had, particularly discussions of claims expressed directly or indirectly within the poem "Sojourns in a Parallel World" and the essay "Living Like Weasels." As you have seen, authors of literary works often present claims—occasionally through explicit statements by a narrator or character but more often through implicit suggestions of the author’s perspective or attitude.

Consider this guiding question:

5. What claims do you find in the poem—both stated and implied?

Note that Frost writes "having perhaps the better claim." Then consider an example in "The Road Not Taken" of an explicit claim made by its narrator, such as the following:

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same

Step 2

With a reading partner, review the poem, looking for and annotating other explicit claims made by the narrator in telling the story.

Now look for places in the poem where claims are not directly stated but are implied and communicated indirectly. Make notes about such claims and the textual details that suggest them.

Step 3

In a class discussion, identify the explicit claims made by the narrator in "The Road Not Taken." Discuss how these claims structure the telling of the story on a literal level.

Then, identify claims implied within the poem when you read between the lines. Referring to specific places, images, and words in the poem, explain what you think the poem is claiming about the choice of one road over another.

Activity 4: Read – Write – Discuss

In reading teams, we will examine stanzas of the poem more closely, concentrating on Frost’s use of imagery and the metaphorical or symbolic layers of meaning in the poem.

Step 1

Follow along as your teacher discusses two literary concepts that are key to reading and interpreting "The Road Not Taken": imagery and narrative voice. You previously discussed these concepts in the context of other texts.

Join a three-person expert team that will read one stanza of the poem more closely, focusing again on the literal level conveyed through its imagery and narrative voice. Your team will be assigned one of the following stanzas and questions:

6. In the first stanza, the speaker sets the poem’s initial scene. What does the traveler see, and what key descriptive words does he use to depict the scene?

7. In the second stanza, what choice does the traveler make? What key details does he present about the two roads?

8. In the third stanza, what additional details does the narrator present about the two roads? What key words does he use to describe how he feels about the choice he has made?

Briefly consider what type of question you are responding to and what kinds of details you might look for.

Step 2

Using an Analyzing Relationships Tool, select, analyze, and develop an observation from key details in your stanza, in response to your question.

In a brief class discussion, identify the details in your stanza that your team has focused on, and present the observation you developed from them using your Analyzing Relationships Tool.

Step 3

Now, follow along as your teacher reviews literary terms that involve implied rather than literal or explicit meaning—the concepts of metaphor and symbolism. You studied the first concept in other texts you have read; the second might be new to you. (Note: The Symbolism and Motifs Reference Guide might be a useful resource in this discussion).

In your expert teams, reread your stanza, now focusing on its implicit levels of meaning, and consider the following question:

10. How does figurative language – imagery, metaphor, and symbolism – suggest other levels of meaning and influence your understanding of the poem?

Identify examples of words and images in your stanza that might also be interpreted as metaphors or symbols.

Using a Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool, consider key details you have identified, and develop a team claim about other levels of meaning in your stanza that are suggested by its imagery, metaphors, and symbols.

Step 4

Gather into a three person home discussion team, with one member from each of the three stanza-based teams.

Using the Analyzing Relationships Tool and Forming Evidence-Based Claims Tool that your team developed, explain how you interpreted your stanza on both a literal (explicit) level and a figurative (implicit) level. Point to key details in the stanza that led to and support your interpretations.

Activity 5: Read – Discuss

We will examine claims made about “The Road Not Taken” by Frost himself and critics who have found the poem to be subtly confusing. We will search for evidence in the poem that might be connected to such claims about it.

Step 1

As a class, discuss the various ways that you have found meaning in "The Road Not Taken." Discuss whether you think the poem has one meaning or many, depending on the reader.

Then consider these two claims made about the poem by literary critics:

"The Road Not Taken" may be the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep’s clothing. - Frank Lentricchia

"The Road Not Taken" has confused audiences literally from the beginning… The difficulty with "The Road Not Taken" starts, appropriately enough, with its title.

- David Orr, "The Poem Everyone Loves and Everyone Gets Wrong," poets.org, 2015

Discuss what the metaphor "a wolf in sheep’s clothing" implies about the poem and its levels of meaning. Then discuss why the poem may have "confused audiences literally from the beginning."

Step 2

In your previous discussion teams, consider one of three additional claims made about "The Road Not Taken" by literary critics and by Frost himself (as assigned by your teacher). Do a close reading of the quotation, then paraphrase what you think it is saying about the poem and its levels of meaning:

The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives…. [but] there is no point in trying to explain away the general misreadings of "The Road Not Taken," as if they were a mistake encouraged by a fraud. The poem both is and isn’t about individualism, and it both is and isn’t about rationalization. It isn’t a wolf in sheep’s clothing so much as a wolf that is somehow also a sheep, or a sheep that is also a wolf. It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

- David Orr, "The Most Misread Poem in America, The Paris Review, 2015

The poem masquerades as a meditation about choice, but the critic William Pritchard suggests that the speaker is admitting that choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had "perhaps the better claim." In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an "impulse" into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions. - Katherine Robinson, Poem Guide, poetryfoundation.org, 2016

My poems—I should suppose everybody’s poems—are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless. Ever since infancy I have had the habit of leaving [objects] where people would be pretty sure to fall forward over them in the dark. Forward, you understand, and in the dark. - Robert Frost, to Leonidas W. Payne Jr., 1927

After determining what critical claim you think the author of your quotation is making, reread the poem, looking for details that might support the claim.

Step 3

Report back to the class about your quotation, how you have paraphrased it, and what it might suggest about the cryptic or puzzling nature of a poem that, on its surface, seems to have a relatively simple meaning. Reference specific details from the poem that you think either support (or refute) the claim you have examined.

Activity 6: Discuss – Write

We will examine the final stanza of the poem and its various potential levels of meaning, as well as the puzzling nature of the poem’s title and author’s comments about it. individually, we will determine the meaning we have found in the poem and how it might relate to living a life well-lived and following a compass in our journeys within the world around us.

Step 1

As a class, we will examine the final stanza of the poem on both literal and figurative levels, considering and discussing these text-specific questions:

9. In the fourth and final stanza, the narrator steps back from the scene he has been describing. From what point in time is he viewing his decision about which road to take? What key words suggest his various feelings about that choice?

10. What is the central metaphor developed in the poem? What might the story of the two roads in the wood mean on a more symbolic level?

Share examples of key words from the fourth stanza and the symbolic meaning they might suggest.

Step 2

Individually, consider what the poem and its symbolism might mean to you. But also consider these questions about possible puzzling or ironic levels of meaning conveyed by Frost in "The Road Not Taken."

12. The poem focuses on the road that the traveler takes, but the poem’s title is "The Road Not Taken." What does this make you wonder about? What evidence from the poem suggests that it might have multiple meanings?

13. What evidence from the poem suggests that the narrator might be someone other than the poet himself? How might this change your understanding of the poem?

Step 3

Considering either Question 11, 12, or 13, form an evidence-based claim about what you think Robert Frost is saying in the poem "The Road Not Taken."

Then, write a short reflective narrative about how you arrived at your claim about the poem’s meaning and how it is connected to specific images, metaphors, and symbols in the poem. Discuss whether you see its meaning as "having the better claim" in your own quest to make good choices, live a life worth living, and follow compasses (such as this poem) as you undertake your journey in the world around you.