Question of the Day

Yellow wood: Frost's answer

It was a pleasure reading through everyone's answers. It was even more of a pleasure to follow one reader's hint, do a little research, and learn what the poet's intentions were in terms of what the poem "really means."

This isn't the place for a deep deconstruction of the poem; but even the seeming simplicity of the woods being yellow hinged on the hidden complexity of the entire work.

It turns out that Frost was, in "The Road Not Taken," poking some gentle fun at a friend of his, Edward Thomas. We all know people like Thomas. He's like that friend whom, no matter how much affection you may have for her and how much you enjoy her company, you can't stand to take to dinner at a restaurant, because she'll spend an hour reading the menu and moaning about what to have or not to have. It's as if she'll never get to eat at a restaurant again (and that may be so, at least so far as your taking her to one goes). She'll finally pick something, and then even before it arrives, she'll start fretting about how she should have ordered the steak, she always enjoys steak, why didn't she order steak. Whereas you know darned well that, had she in fact ordered that instead, she would have driven you to sitting on your hands so as not to jab her with an oyster fork just to stop the ceaseless lament about how she really ought to be eating more fish.

Edward Thomas was the hiking equivalent of this dining partner, which isn't really important to the "yellow wood" question. He and Frost would often go for nature walks in Dymock, a village in Gloucestershire, England, and that is important to the question. Because the woods around this village, according to Wikipedia's entry on the poem, "were carpeted with wild daffodils (hence the ‘yellow wood')."

This is a bit of a jolt to Frost's American readers, who are, when visualizing his "wood," going to think quite naturally of his native New England. This in turn leads to the famous changing color of the leaves each fall. Which again seems natural for a poem that reads like an autumnal piece in every sense: the looking back on how life has been spent, the pondering of the choices that have been made, and where another choice might have led instead.

A carpet of blossoming daffodils throw this theory right out on its ear, as does, perhaps, the fact that the poem was written when Frost was in his early forties – no longer youthful, perhaps, but hardly heading swiftly toward his life's final wintery chill.

And to think that if my son, being as he is at the very beginning of what I hope will be a joyful, light-filled journey, hadn't naturally thought of sunshine when the color yellow was mentioned, I never would have learned any of this.

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