Poetry
Posted: April 15th, 2009 | Filed under: Pop Culture | 71 Comments »
A poetry blog post? Yeah, well, it’s different. And, anyway, I don’t want to write again about the horrors of Kyle Farnsworth.
I’m sure it will not surprise you, but I know very little about poetry. I do have a verse of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard” memorized …
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom’d caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
… but let’s be honest, I really remember that because of its role in “Bull Durham.”
One poem I do love and read often is the one I consider the most famous American poem*: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” The poem is often called “The Road Less Traveled,” and it was written by Frost in 1915.
*So far, Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven,” leads in our poll. I considered putting in “There once was a man from Nantucket” … but I’m not sure who wrote it. And while I admire the artistry of “Because the man from Mars stopped eating cars and eating bars and now he only eats guitars. Get up!” I doubt that Rapture qualifies as poetry.
I’m not certain that I’m really allowed to reprint the poem, but I’ll leave it up until I’m asked to take it down:
Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth
Then took the other as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet, knowing how way leads onto 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 took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference
Now, here’s the thing. When I first read the poem — maybe the first 50 times I read it — I came to the same conclusion: This poem is about finding your own path. Take the road less traveled by. That will make all the difference. To me the poem was about individualism and making your own way and breaking away from the crowds. I remember when Kansas’ basketball star Jacque Vaughn announced that he was coming back for his senior year, he quoted the poem, saying that by coming back he wanted to take the road less traveled.
But as I have gotten older, and as I’ve read the poem more and more, I’ve come to take a whole different meaning from the poem. I’m not sure my new meaning is right. I’m not even sure if there is a right or wrong. I think it’s more about this: The poem hasn’t changed, but I have.
And It’s clear to me as an older guy that Frost, as author of the poem, does not really KNOW which path is less traveled. Sure, he stands at the fork in the road, and looks down the first path as far as he can. Then he looks down the second path and he notices happily that it is grassy and wants wear — it looks, at first, like it is the road less traveled.
But read on: he looks again and realizes that, no, it looks about the same (“Though as for that, the passing there/Had worn them really about the same”). He’s like my oldest daughter Elizabeth staring at two toys in Target, knowing she can only have one, trying to imagine which one would be more fun to play with. One minute, she thinks the Bratz Doll would be more fun. The next minute, no, she wants the puppy vet set. And then, it’s back again.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
See? Both roads looked the same. Both roads looked like roads less traveled by. Frost as author tried and tried, but he could not find anything to tell them apart. It seems to me he had a hunch about the second road, but it was only a hunch. A guess. That’s life. There are so few obvious decisions, so few clear-cut choices. He had absolutely no reason to take that second road except that somehow, some way, it seemed right to him. And so he took the second road — and not without regret. (“Oh, I kept the first for another day!”).
And then, the killer final verse. I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence. People will ask him: Why did you take that road? How did you get here? And he will tell them — with a sigh — that it is because the it was the road less traveled by, and that made all the difference. But, of course, it’s the sigh that matters. He knows the real reason he took the second road: He followed an uncertain instinct. And he got lucky. He could have easily taken the other road. He could easily have gone a different way.
That’s what the poem means to me now.When I was young, I saw the poem one way: Be yourself. Take chances. Follow the unbeaten path.
But now, here I am, middle-aged, stunned that I’m here, and even more stunned by how many people ask how I got here. That do ask, so I tell them that I got here because when I was 24 years old I took a chance and moved down to write sports in Augusta, Ga., and then I moved up to write at an afternoon paper in Cincinnati, and then I got an offer for a job in Kansas City — a place I had never even visited — and I took that job, and then I started this silly blog that people actually started reading, and then Sports Illustrated called and, yes, I took the road less traveled by …
But let’s not kid anybody: I got lucky. That’s what it’s all about. You take the road that feels right at that moment, the road that somehow feels new and fortunate, and if it works out then you can write books and hold lectures and tell people that you took the road less traveled by. But it’s not that simple. Life is never that simple. Sigh.
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Damn, Joe, but you’re a pleasure to read. Thanks
“Never will man penetrate deeper into error than when he is continuing on a road that has led him to great success.” F. A. Hayek
A very insightful comment, Joe.
That said… it should be “one road diverged,” shouldn’t it?
Or is there some even deeper meaning in which the speaker is actually on two roads at once, eying four different future roads, any two of which he could take?
Your later reading is the more common critical reading; the whole point is that it *didn’t* make a difference–or not one that he could’ve known beforehand, anyway–and so Vaughn and all the thousands of other people that quote the poem for the same purpose are really kind of unwittingly making fun of themselves.
The poem was published in 1916, and I believe that it’s no longer subject to copyright. Even if it is, though, you can find full versions of it in about seventy million different places on the internet, so I’m thinking no one is particularly likely to come after you.
Eyeing. Firefox’s spell-check takes the road less traveled by.
Great post Joe…never looked at the poem that way.
The real irony of the poem for me is that I’ve heard that poem quoted at pretty much every graduation I’ve ever been to, making “The Road Less Traveled” “The Poem Most Quoted as a Cheap Proxy for Inspiration.”
Well Joe, if it makes you feel any better about your analysis, my college lit class last semester examined this poem and came to the exact same conclusion you did. Those last couple lines make me wish that it WAS all about making meaningful decisions and choosing your own path, but sadly they do not. Always a pleasure to read your work!
The Bridge Builder, by Will Allen Dromgoole. If you don’t already know it, look it up. It’s a great poem with very good intentions.
Oh, didn’t realize you only wanted most famous
While I voted for “Raven” and think that’s probably right now given the choices, for some period after January 20, 1961 I suspect Frost was #1.
In reality you missed the real #1, the “anonymous” “Desiderata”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desiderata
You’ve seen the posters that begin
Go placidly amid the noise and the haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
surely the highest Billboard poem of them all #7 with a bullet in 1971!
Don’t worry about copyright violations; Bob Bell is a personal friend.
And no place for Ernest Thayer in your poll! I’m shocked shocked! You didn’t say good poetry!
Bill up above is right: the poem’s old enough to have fallen out of copyright, so you’re on solid ground reprinting it–anything published before 1923 is in the public domain. And your experience of reading it matches mine of recent years exactly: it’s a poem so familiar that you think you know it–until you look at it more closely and find much more ambiguity and interest there than you’d ever expected.
If you want a continuing distraction from Farnsworth and you still have poetry on the brain, you might enjoy the piece I wrote a couple of years ago for the Poetry Foundation on poetry and baseball: . I particularly enjoy the baseball poems that people left in the comments section.
I would say that the Defense of Fort M’Henry is the most famous simply because its first verse is our national anthem. I mean, c’mon, they don’t read The Raven before ballgames.
i roll deep w/ Whitman.
his ability to put the Civil War and it’s aftermath in such amazing words moves me to this day.
I think the poll question hinges on what you mean by “most famous”.
“Defence of Fort M’Henry” is definately the most well-known, because some genius in a Baltimore tavern combined it with an English drinking song and turned it into “The Star-Spangled Banner”. However, that is outside of it’s original form; it would be like saying “Born to Run” is the most famous “poem” in America.
“The Raven” and “The Road Less Travelled” are easily the two most famous in their original form, but you rarely see them in full. Usually you just either have someone quothing “Nevermore” or, as was mentioned, using the “And I, I took the one less travelled by…” lines as a metaphor for something.
Most of the rest end up as just snippets in the memory from ninth-grade English or as part of movie references. I do think “Green Eggs and Ham” is high up on the list, though. Probably some of Shel Silversteen’s poems would give all of these a run for their money, too.
I voted for this as the most famous poem, but basically I only knew the first and last 2 lines. I just read it again, and I came to the same conclusion as you, before reading your comments. I think most people know it like I do. Something along the lines of “two roads diverged, i took less traveled, that made all the difference”.
If read in full, I suspect, most would come to the same conclusion as you.
But seriously, this is good stuff Joe.
@bulb #10, the interesting thing is that Robert Frost did not read “The Road Not Taken” at JFK’s inauguration. Anyways, I probably don’t have enough life experience, nor have I read enough poetry to come to the conclusion you arrived in this piece, so consider myself enlightened. I was about to vote “Green Eggs and Ham,” but I changed my vote to “The Raven” at the last minute as a tribute to Poe, who attended my alma mater, UVA.
Wahoo-wa.
Reading poetry as a daily enjoyment has sadly been replaced in the lives of most with other things.
There once was a time when sitting comfortably and reading a few lines of poetry was relaxation and meditation.
Now we only look to our smartphones and wonder who is following us on Twitter.
-Ezra Hilyer
http://www.straypoetry.com
Who is the poet laureate of baseball these days? It used to be Ed Charles of the Mets.
If the poem was published in 1915, it is in the public domain. If someone tells you to take it down, tell them to take a hike.
I think you’re safe on copywright, but it applies to 75 years after the author is dead, not after the work is written. If Frost renewed the rights during his lifetime, it is not public domain for quite a while yet.
I have a different take on the poem. The road he chose really did make a difference, and it is for the far worse. He just HAD to take the lesser travelled road, and he found there was a reason it was not so popular. His despair or bitterness in pinned on that one event which made all the difference.
I don’t think this is the only take, but I think it’s a reasonable possibility.
Probably far from true, but I voted for Casey at the Bat.
Great post as usual, Joe. But my eyes popped out of my head a bit as I thought you wrote that your daughter was choosing between two boys at Target, trying to decide which one would be more fun to play with. I didn’t grasp it as “toys” until rereading the paragraph.
Blondie has much to answer for: I consider Rapture to be the first modern rap song. Of course, rap has its roots going all the way back to vaudeville and then to Gilbert and Sullivan and patter songs. I think it’s definitely acceptable to teach/consider songs as poetry. My AP English teacher taught the Beatles’ “She’s Leaving Home” as poetry, and it is one great poem*. Paul Simon wrote in “Homeward Bound” that (assuming he and Art Garfunkel were) “a poet and a one man band.” Plenty of beat poems need the rhythm of the reading to give them emphasis. So go ahead and list Blondie. I’ll mock you, because it’s a pretty bad poem and far from their best song, but songs as poems are perfectly acceptable to me.
Wednesday morning at five o’clock
as the day begins
Silently closing her bedroom door
Leaving the note that she hoped would say more
She goes downstairs to the kitchen
clutching her handkerchief
Quietly turning the back door key
Stepping outside she is free
If that isn’t poetry, then there is no such thing as poetry.
You asked for famous, not quality. So I picked “The Raven”. IIRC, there were more episodes of “The Simpsons” with references to “The Raven” than any of the other poems listed. But if you had asked for “The Star Spangled Banner” and subtitled it “Defense of Fort McHenry” that would have gotten my vote for fame. Still not quality, but there may be a couple of billion non-English speakers who will never hear of “The Raven” that will still hear “The Star Spangled Banner” sometime or another, probably during an Olympics broadcast.
For some reason (perhaps the idea of the author accepting and being satisfied with what has happened, coupled with the sad reminders we’ve had about life’s fleeting nature these last few days?), this brought to mind my wife’s favorite poem, Erat Hora by Ezra Pound:
“Thank you, whatever comes.” And then she turned
And, as the ray of sun on hanging flowers
Fades when the wind hath lifted them aside,
Went swiftly from me. Nay, whatever comes,
One hour was sunlit, and the most high gods
May not make boast of any better thing
Than to have watched that hour as it passed.
And as long as I’m referencing her favorite poem, I should probably pimp her blog, like a good husband (though I must admit, seeing the words “pimp” and “good husband” so close to each other is a bit jarring):
http://mfnerathora.blogspot.com
And her specific post on the poem: http://mfnerathora.blogspot.com/2008/02/ezra-pound.html
Great post Joe.
After your post about the day you decided to go into journalism, I was going to ask you whether you thought that decision was destiny or just luck. Maybe thats secondary to the fact that you actually made a decision. Perhaps the real metaphor is about a guy who chose a path, didn’t really matter which one, instead of deciding he was lost and heading back the way he came.
I always have read this poem like Joe does now, but when I look at it fresh, I question myself. Joe seems to see the sigh as a good thing, but to me it connotes regret. I don’t know if I exactly see the despair or bitterness Bucky does; I think I interpret it to be about always second-guessing our decisions, especially our major ones. No matter which road that cat took, and what happened from there, he was always going to wonder about the road he didn’t take.
But maybe he sighs when he’s happy, I don’t know. Until just now, I always thought he was damned pleased with himself for taking the road less traveled, and I can see where it’d be hard to switch after reading it that way since high school. Probably it means whatever the reader wants it to mean; I think Joe said as much, much more eloquently.
I’m with Bucky (No. 20).
You wrote: “But, of course, it’s the sigh that matters. He knows the real reason he took the second road: He followed an uncertain instinct. And he got lucky.”
What makes it clear that he got lucky? Maybe it was a sigh of regret, and he wishes he had gone the other way.
I’d go with When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d by Walt Whitman, about the death of Lincoln, but maybe that’s just me. Other good options are Fire and Ice by Frost.
@Bucky (#20): Any work first published in the U.S. before 1923 is public domain.
http://www.copyright.cornell.edu/public_domain/
And yeah, Joe, what everyone else said. Typically excellent.
I believe that Donald Hall is still the poet laureate of baseball.
I tear up at stupid sitcoms so I’m not a rock. But I so completely don’t get poetry. I can’t say that I’ve ever read a single poem that spoke to me. Maybe if I could watch Carrot Top recite one…
You’re not lucky, Joe. You’re blessed, as are we all.
FYI–this type of reading applies to almost all of Frost’s poetry. He’s usually saying the opposite of what you first think he’s saying.
The fact that copyright law extends to 75 years after the original author dies is seriously messed up and needs to be changed. Heaven forbid the original author’s great grandchildren lose out on some of the cash a famous work generates…jeez!
What? Is Kyle Farnsworth single-handedly blowing games or something…sheesh. How about this for a poll question – Who would you rather have, Mike MacDougal or Farnsworth?
I’m repeating others here, but your reading of the poem is what I understand to be the “critically approved” one. Certainly my high school AP English teacher agrees with you, as do I. It’s always bothered me when people cite this poem casually in a “Carpe Diem!” sort of way, and completely ignore the poem’s middle section.
I really, really like your explanation. Thanks. One gripe: you’ve got the words “And I” at the end of the poem in the wrong line. The last three lines should read like this:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Not only does this keep the rhyme scheme intact, but I think it also lends further support to what you’re saying about the poem’s meaning. It suggests, I think, that the speaker needs to pause in order to make up a reason for why the past has led to the present.
Not most famous, but my favourite:
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Great post, Joe.
By the way, in In Retrospect, Robert McNamara reprints The Palace, by Rudyard Kipling. It reminds me of this post, in that it’s about looking back at where you’ve ended up and philosophizing about how you got there…the McNamara/Kipling connection is just a little more tragic.
And yes, I think comparing Joe’s career arc with that of one of the architects of the Vietnam War is totally appropriate.
I was like Jason #22…I was certain that your precocious daughter was picking out a boy she wanted to play with @ Target.
Oh, I’d rather have the ghost of Mark Fidrych than the live Kyle Farnsworth.
Lucky? I think not. It was luck that you are married to Margo, falling in love and marriage is more about fate and destiny and luck and such. Having two beautiful, happy, healthy girls is luck (and answered prayers, etc). But your being a famous America author, blogger, columnist, pozerisker, and various whatnot is about TALENT. Joe, you are loaded with it- and your writing is spectatular, and your path to being a terrific writer would have ended up in ‘famous’ about nine thousand different ways. The path through Augusta and Cincinnati to KC was the one you took, but Macon to Billings to Dallas- and you are still a fantastic writer and famous- you would just be writing more about the right side of Rangers infield and less about Klye Farnsworth.
You wouldn’t say that Michael Jordan was lucky and that is how he got to be the greatest b-ball player of all time, would you?
We don’t get to pick Casey at the Bat? Ah, I wouldn’t pick it anyway.
I agree with Andy (#27). There’s nothing in the poem to indicate that he got lucky by making the choice he did. As Bill (#4) said, “the whole point is that it *didn’t* make a difference.”
And btw Joe did a great job at the library benefit at the brewery tonight. If you get a chance to hear him speak in person, take it.
“And sorry I could not travel both”
-He feels regret even before choosing his path.
“And having perhaps the better claim”
-Perhaps the better claim though really worn about the same.
“I kept the first for another day!”
-To me, the exclamation point denotes incredulity. He knew/knows how way leads on to way. He understands the absurdity of saving a road for another day. This will never happen and he knows it. You can’t go home again.
Oh, that sigh is far from pleasant, my friend. That is a sigh of angst, regret, and resignation.
That’s how I read it, anyway.
Savvy readers y’all are!
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
One of Frost’s most American poems, I think.
Knowing of our love for practical wisdom, and our distrust of introspection, Frost gives us a poem about the relation between these two ways of living a life. Reflection is terrifying, because it can’t solve the problem–and so the speaker stammers (the dash), and imposes the comforting, conclusive motto.
The motto is so comforting, and the thought process so uncomfortable, that many readers naturally prefer to retain only the motto. English teachers can explain why they shouldn’t do this–but the poem itself explains why they do….
Joe, you may be lucky, but you sure have talent!!!
Nick #43–that’s clever–I might steal that next time I teach the poem. And for the record, Joe, when I teach the poem in my college American Lit class, I guide my students toward the more somber reading (your more recent reading). I do this in part because it is pretty clear that this is what Frost meant, but also because my students are young and starry-eyed and ambitious and they want to see the poem as optimistic, and I guess my job description is to make students think harder (and perhaps think darker) than they are inclined to without prodding.
And as far as some other comments: we don’t really know whether the guy made the right choice or not–nothing in the poem tells us–all that we know is that his choice made a “difference.” Whether it is a good or bad difference, he doesn’t say because he can’t really know. Arguably, he’s not really saying anything, though there is a certain kind of existential clarity in foregoing self-justifying bravado and acknowledging one’s own not-knowing. For instance, once upon a time I had a choice to go to grad school in English or law school, and I picked the PhD route. What was down the other road? I have no idea. More money, to be sure (along with longer hours), but would I be happier outside the ivory tower? Would I miss thinking about books? Would I feel like I sold out? Would the bad poems I wrote about grad school women have worked as well on law school women? I have no idea. If you’re honest about your life, the decisions you have made that were indubitably right or wrong are few and far between.
That said, one thing I’ve come to see more and more is that, for all his melancholy, Frost expresses a real love of life in the poem as well. The speaker is “sorry I could not travel both [roads] and be one traveler,” which is to say that he wishes he could somehow live out every possible path that life could offer. And really, how fascinating would that be? You live out your life, and one day when you’re 80, you hit the reset button and you’re 16 again (or 18 or 22 or 12 or whatever) and you get to test out some other possibility entirely. Which is to say that what I like about the poem is that its sense of the inherent sadness of life–the sadness of all those paths we never take–is intimately connected to our sense of how beautiful life is. Life is sad because no matter how much of it we get, we’ll always want more life.
What’s always clued me in to the fact that the poem is not as optimistic as commonly assumed is that it ends with a clunk. The rhythm and rhyme scheme are so fluid throughout, but you hit that last word and it sounds like a misstep. “Difference” never really rhymes with “ages hence” on a first reading.
But if you go back and read the stanza again, with the knowledge of what “difference” is supposed to rhyme with, you can force it to flow by adoptin a certain affectation & lilt. IF you make sure to give each syllable in “difference” it’s due, instead of smooshing it into 2 syllables as most people will tend to do, and IF you make sure to truly pronounce the e in last syllable, instead of saying “ince” as most people will tend to do, you can make it sound polished. But it’s only with the advantage of hindsight that the pieces can be made to work together so tidily.
“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.”
Great analysis Joe. The following has always been my favorite:
IF
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
But make allowance for their doubting too,
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream–and not make dreams your master,
If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings–nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much,
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And–which is more–you’ll be a Man, my son!
–Rudyard Kipling
The poem reflects the ambiguity and uncertainty of life. Even after making a choice we can never be certain whether it was the right or the wrong choice. But it “made all the difference.” The sigh is equally ambiguous–pleasure or regret.
Poe’s middle name is constantly misspelled; for the record: Edgar Allan Poe.
One of my very favorite quotes is “luck is the residue of design”
I love it because it acknowledges the powerful role that blind, dumb luck plays in life, while still implying that we must take most of the credit/blame for where we are in life.
Luck exists, but we have to put ourselves in a position to be lucky. That’s pretty good advice that I should probably follow more often myself.
Favorite poem, although not American: Ulysses.
Wow, I’m surprised that no one has yet noted how the great American philosopher Lawrence P. Berra managed to distill the meaning of this poem into his one immortal line: “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”
Man in Black (@39):
Talent and hard work still lose out to luck often enough to declare luck the winner. How many minor league studs never made the show due to freak injuries? How many brilliant and hard-working people never strike it rich because they never managed to find the right opportunity at the right time? How many baseball games have been decided by the curving flight of a looping line drive landing just one inch fair or foul — a situation which depends neither on talent or hard work, given the atomically small difference between the spot where the bat actually hit the ball and the spot on the bat which would have caused the opposite result?
Even landing the right partner — you had to be in the same place at the same time (literally or figuratively) at some point, right? Your tire has a blowout on the way to the coffee shop, and instead of bumping into that girl in line, you end up arriving five minutes after she’s left. Or your tire doesn’t have a blowout, so you end up not sitting in the waiting area at Goodyear with that cute girl who’s getting her tires rotated.
No… in the end, luck is everything. We certainly influence our own ability to capitalize on good luck and avoid bad luck by using our talent, brains, and effort, but ultimately it’s all about right place, right time, and a butterfly flapping its wings in Sumatra.
Oh, also, Joe:
Really, how can “Casey at the Bat” not be on the list?
And then there’s “Baseball’s Sad Lexicon” too, which I bet more people know than at least half the poems on your list above.
Obviously, neither of these pieces is Pulitzer material, but then the question was “famous,” not “most important” or “best” or anything of that nature. And while I’d be willing to bet that most people who can recite “Dream Deferred” also recognize “Casey,” I’d lay the same money on there being a ton of people who can recite “Casey” but who barely even know who Langston Hughes IS.
I could really get into poetry if I knew where to find discussions like this of other poems . . .
Ben (#45): “or instance, once upon a time I had a choice to go to grad school in English or law school, and I picked the PhD route. What was down the other road? I have no idea.”
I guess I picked the path you didn’t, and went to law school instead of grad school (for history). Sigh.
Ben #45: Oh, your last paragraph is just beautiful. Thank you.
A more recent meditation on luck, chance, and how it changes your life:
And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful
Wife
And you may ask yourself – well…how did I get here?
So, yes, I think “Rapture” is at least worth of consideration.
And I second others (and repeat my comment from an earlier post): where is “Casey at the Bat”? And especially coming from you, Joe, and on this blog.
Given that “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is one of the three most performed songs in the country (“Star-Spangled Banner” and “Happy Birthday” the other two, for those wondering), I think that Casey deserves some consideration as “famous” (and, no, I am not trying to start another “what means Hall of Fame” thread). At the very least, I think most Americans are familiar the beginning (“The outlook wasn’t brilliant”) and the ending (“Mighty Casey has struck out”).
One last observation, Joe: While your focus may be on baseball in particular, and sports in general, I think this posting is further evidence that you could write about anything and make it interesting.
As Man in Black #39 said, you’ve got TALENT.
It ain’t luck Joe, it’s talent.
I don’t know if it qualifies as a poem, but The Night Before Christmas is pretty well known.
I read this blog and its comments daily, but rarely post, mainly because I lack the proficiency with words that the majority of the regular commenter’s enjoy. However, after reading this entry, I had to comment and say how much I enjoyed this thread, and how much I enjoy everything Joe writes. Thank you, Joe, for sharing your unbelievable talent and thanks to the rest of you for sharing your thoughts.
Go Royals!
I’m with Seth, both on Joe’s talents, and those of the many “brilliant readers.”
I wonder if there isn’t some cautionary, inspirational advice in the poem used as mentioned so often in graduation ceremonies. As we take that goat skin we’re about to embark on our road, often making the same sort of irrevocable choice on a career, on a PHd, on graduate school, law school, medical school or even deciding to tour the world. And the advice is that whatever that choice is, though you will be able to imagine what might have happened on that other road, the one you are on is the one upon which you must continue to travel. So do your best to make the most of that road, to miss the potholes, to enjoy the vistas along the way, and to not dwell on the ifs, buts, could haves and should haves. The world is too full of people living in regret instead of making the best of what’s been chosen, as Joe has done with both his luck and his talent.
Re: Jon @ 51
Luck is important, but it is far from everything. Louis Pasteur said it best: Chance favors the prepared mind.
Of course, he said it in French.
Thank you for revisiting a poem I know mostly for being on the back of every graduation program that was ever handed to me. Given the graduation context, perhaps it’s telling that I wrongly remember the poem to be titled “The Road Less Traveled”.
Inevitably we only have the path we we are on to compare to a hypothetical. You can do as Frost indicates he will — patting himself on the back for the choice he made, calling it wisdom, when perhaps it was closer to a guess or a hunch. Equally, you can regret the choice (Road Traveled Remorse).
Compare Frost with the opening scene of *Slacker*, where Richard Linklater laments to a cabbie about not taking the other road only minutes after the choice.
Here is a redux version [reductions by me]:
”
I mean, it’s like…uh, you know, in the Wizard of Oz…when Dorothy meets the Scarecrow and they do that little dance at that crossroads…and they think about going all those directions…then they end up going in that one direction. I mean, all those other directions, just because they thought about it…became separate realities. They just went on from there and lived the rest of their life. I mean, entirely different movies, but we’ll never see it…because, you know, we’re kind of trapped in this one reality restriction type of thing.
[...]
As I got off the bus, the thought crossed my mind…you know, just for a second, about not taking a cab at all. [... ]But, uh, just ’cause that thought crossed my mind…there now exists at this very second…a whole ‘nother reality where I’m at the bus station…
I mean, at this very second,… I’m back at the bus station just hangin’ out, you know…Say this beautiful woman just comes up to me, just starts talking to me, you know? Uh, she ends up offering me a ride, you know. We’re hitting it off. Go play a little pinball. And we go back to her apartment, I mean, she has this great apartment. I move in with her, you know.
[...]
Man, sh*t. I should’ve stayed at the bus station.
“
[...] Posnanski revisits a poem I know mostly for being on the back of every graduation program that was ever handed to me.   Given the graduation context, perhaps it’s telling that I wrongly remember the poem to be titled “The Road Less Traveled”.   [...]
Damn, Joe, you are a fantastic writer.
William Carlos Williams should have a shot at the title.
Joe, another great blog post. I’ve not read much poetry lately other than the poems my 13 year old writes for class (since the boys left the Suess age), but this will get me to pick up a book or two or poetry over the next few days.
I recommend the poem The Cremation of Sam McGee by Robert W.Service. It’s not as serious and heavy as Eliot or Frost, but it’s very American. He’s not American but his works focus on the Yukon.
Anyway, if you were looking to get back into poetry he has some good ones.
Like the idea, but yeah, something by Langston Hughes, cause he captures race in America during the 1920s.
Here’s one every school kid reads:
I’ve known rivers:
I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
flow of human blood in human veins.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy
bosom turn all golden in the sunset.
I’ve known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
It’s a vivid picture, the yellow wood, the black leaves.
Frost was about 40. He’d done some farming because no one without a reputation can support himself as a poet. He’d done some teaching. He’d taken his family to England (where he probably wrote “Road Not Taken”) for three years, published his first book collection there, then come back to New England in 1915 and had “Road” published as the first poem in his second book.
Given a different temperament, he might have become a Professor of Literature. While he did take appointments at various universities, Frost did not turn into a full-time academic. Was his the best of all possible Frost lives? Was his the only possible Frost life? It got him much favorable recognition, but it was not trouble-free.
Mark Harris (“Bang the Drum Slowly,” in the Henry Wiggen manner) wrote a long article after spending time with Sandburg and Frost. He expected to prefer Frost, but after the one-on-ones, he didn’t.
Long time reader, first time writer. At my fancy 2001 college graduation our president read us Frost’s “Birches.” My wise-ass friends and I all assumed this was the introduction to some speech-or-other about doing well in the world. But no. Pres took his sweet time in delving into all the textual/contextual ins and outs of this thing, and we were lost pretty quick. (We were ready go GO – we were GRADUATES. What was this damn close reading supposed to be good for?) These days I have a bit more appreciation for what great works of writing mean, and how they relate to the day-to-day. But it’s hard to stay alert, and so my point is this: posts like this one are like Susan Doyle – it’s great to see something (anything) with new eyes. Thanks.
Joe,
I won’t give you the full thing because A) I doubt this thread is getting much attention at this point and B) you can get the gist of this poem from the excerpt, but I’d like to present you with my favorite piece of poetry, courtesy of Charles Bukowski. Blame it on the college student in me…
Beer
Rivers and seas of beer
The radio sings love songs
As the phone remains silent
And the walls stand
Straight up and down
And beer is all there is.
Robert Frost has a few other good ones, including this one that I personally feel is his best poem:
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.