Question of the Day

Poetry Question: Yellow wood in "The Road Not Taken"

The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost

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.

My son and I were reading "The Road Not Taken" the other morning. He's eight, so the poems we read tend to be simple and straightforward. I read him the poem out loud first, slowly but without stopping even for difficult words. Then I go back and read it again, pausing and defining any words I think he might not know ("'diverged' means went in a different direction"). Then I read it one more time, one line at a time, asking him after each line to tell me what it means.

Things were going fine with "The Road Not Taken" until we had our third go-over on the first line. I read it to him:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

and asked him why the woods would be yellow. His answer was completely different from the one I'd thought of, and I realized that I was assuming my interpretation was the correct one simply because it was mine.

I asked readers for their opinion of why the woods would be yellow.

Your answers | Frost's answer

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