The Road to Heaven and Hell

A week or so ago I posted an article about Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" that I had written for a course reader for our freshman students. I mentioned in that post that I am reconsidering my stance in that article. Not regarding the content of the poem, because I still largely agree with what I wrote then, but about the accuracy of Frost's metaphor for life.

I was prompted to think about this while reading Dennis Danielson's book, Milton's Good God. That book takes a broad look at the theodicy of Milton's epic poem and does so in large part by contextualizing Milton within seventeenth century (and prior) theologies. In the chapter on the importance of God's providence for any theodicy, Danielson discusses grace and free will within their Augustinian context. 

Danielson begins by noting that, for Augustine, "grace" is primarily related to matters of salvation and damnation. (This is not perfectly so. Augustine believed that "grace" included good works emanating from salvation, but grace has long maintained this inextricable association with salvation.) Upon this point he elaborates. . .

[T]his recognition that grace and free will primarily concern matters of salvation and damnation will discourage the uncritical acceptance of the pagan, ethical model of choice involving fundamentally a decision between vice and virtue. . . The parting of the ways is symbolized by 'the Pythagorean letter,' Y; and the general picture is of a person standing in neither the way of vice nor the way of virtue but having to choose between these ways.

Danielson asserts that Christians have historically rejected such a visual of decision-making. Piggybacking off of the work of the early church father Lactantius, Danielson claims that "in a Christian view, there is not one 'neutral' road with two ways forking off it in the divergent directions of virtue and vice; there is but one road, which can be traveled in two opposite directions, toward light or toward darkness, toward heaven or toward hell." In other words, we are all traveling on the same road; the question is, which way are we traveling? Danielson concludes, "And if one is traveling the road to death, one will find no fork in the road: The only way to change direction is precisely to be turned around, converted."

This last line immediately brought to my mind the great moment of moral decision of the title character in Shakespeare's Macbeth. After killing King Duncan and his friend Banquo (spoiler alert!), Macbeth is suffering deep pangs of conscience over his actions. When deciding what to do next, specifically in regard to the thane Macduff who has shown signs of disloyalty to Macbeth's rule, Macbeth metaphorically imagines himself in a river of blood, in an image I find resonant with the Christian image of a single road:

. . .                            I am in blood
Stepped in so far, that should I wade no more,
Returning were as tedious as go o'er.

Macbeth acknowledges that he has put himself in an almost impossible situation. When I teach this section I always draw a (crappy) picture of a stick figure Macbeth stranded midway in a river of blood. If you've read or seen Macbeth, or know that it's a tragedy, you will know what decision he makes. He is going to try to "go o'er." He is going to press deeper into this river. 

He needs conversion, to be turned around, as Danielson puts it. While he rejects that as an option, Macbeth, at the very least, is clear-eyed about his prospects. He cannot magically extricate himself from this river and take an adjacent, blood-free tributary that gets him out of trouble. It is forward towards hell or backwards toward repentance. He makes his decision and damns himself. (He also, I think, importantly overlooks something: there is no end to this river of blood; once he has stepped out into it, he has entered upon a never-ending cycle of death and betrayal to keep his kingdom. He can keep going, but there is no conceivable end.)

Unsurprisingly, I like the Christian model better. I don't think Frost had this type of thing in mind when he wrote his poem. It is probably slightly uncharitable to lump him in here. But I think the Christian model is preferable to the pagan, Y-model because the Christian view comports more with reality. For we are ever moral creatures making morally-weighted decisions. And there is but one road: narrow at one end and wide at the other.

Two Roads Diverged

I don't teach freshmen anymore (thanks be to God), but I did my first year teaching high school. The spring semester started with a poetry unit and the linchpin of the unit was Robert Frost's famous "The Road Not Taken." We began the semester with the poem and the student's memorized it over the course of a month or so. Boy, do we ever mess up that poem.

I am posting below something I wrote for my students that semester. I am posting it now because I am reconsidering what I wrote. Not, it should be noted, that we royally screw up the interpretation of this poem. By golly, we sure do. But, the moral choice that is presented is, I think, slightly different than the conclusion I reached at the end of this. I will follow up in another post with what I am thinking these days.

Lessons in Paying Attention to Titles: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”

I do not remember everything that hung on the walls of my junior high classrooms, but there is one poster in the sentimental sloganeering covering the walls like vomit that does remain in my memory vault: my sixth grade English teacher had a poster of a verdant forest with a narrow path that split into two directions. At the bottom right-hand corner of the poster was the final words of Robert Frost’s classically misunderstood poem, “The Road Not Taken”: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by,/ And that has made all the difference” (18-20). We might have talked about the poem; in fact, I am sure we did, but mostly I remember my eyes meandering away from whatever the text at hand was to ponder that picture and the wisdom of its final lines. It was, after all, a paean to the American dream: the rugged individual carving out his solitary path and becoming an iconoclast; the non-conformist; the, well, poet, I guess.

Imagine my surprise, then, reading this poem again as an adult and discovering that this sentimental notion of standing out from the crowd and making your way is not at all the message actually being conveyed in the poem. In fact, the actual message of the poem seems to be that life forces us to make decisions that we would rather not make; we therefore spend our time rationalizing what is essentially an irrational decision and then pick a path arbitrarily and hope it works out in the end. Generations of readers who have seen in this poem an affirmation of do-it-yourselfiveness seem to be ignoring something it always bears keeping in mind about a poem: its title. Frost, after all, did not call the poem “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.”

The poem is an extended metaphor comparing life decisions to a split path in a “yellow wood” (1). Immediately we see that the tone is not one of triumph but resignation: the speaker is “sorry” (2) that he cannot take both paths, and though he strains down one path “[t]o where it ben[ds] in the undergrowth” (5) he is unable to clearly comprehend which path is better. Indeed, the other path is “just as fair” (6) and though he is tempted to create a fiction that it is worn less he eventually concedes that “the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same” (9-10). In other words, of the two paths neither is more clearly worn than the other, neither is more aesthetically pleasing, and neither offers a better path. The decision becomes one less of cold calculation or moral bravery than simply a coin flip. The speaker’s choice of the second path had nothing to do with rational decision-making processes, but pure randomness.

As the poem moves into its third stanza regret is mingled in with the randomness. For a fleeting moment the speaker sounds hopeful that he might “[keep] the first for another day” (13) and presumably return to this moment of decision. However, this hope is quickly replaced with the assurance that in life “way leads on to way” and it is impossible to return to the original moment of decision. Paths open upon other paths and the speaker will find himself at another split in the road before too long of an interval.      

Which brings us to the fourth stanza and the ending lines that stared down at generations of Mrs. Timmerman's students. The stanza begins and ends with lines of ambiguity as the speaker imagines narrating this event in the future. The stanza begins, “I shall be telling this with a sigh” (16). In many ways your interpretation of this poem hinges on how you read the single word “sigh.” Is this a sigh of regret? A sigh of relief? A sigh, perhaps, of pleasure? The text is unclear. The second ambiguity, and the one that ends the poem is the final line: “And that has made all the difference” (20). The ambiguity here, of course, is how to read the single word “difference.” I know from experience at various restaurants that the adjective "different"--as in, this tastes different--can be used both positively and negatively. How, then, do we decide?

I believe that the three lines between these two bookends can shed some light on this question. The speaker is imagining himself telling the story of this decision with the ambiguous sigh “[s]omewhere ages and ages hence” (17). The distinction is subtle, but it is clear that his telling of the story diverges from the actual experience of the story. When he imagines himself telling the story, he will create the self-serving fiction that he took the “road less traveled by” (19), but we know from the rest of the poem that there are absolutely no grounds for making this claim. Each road is equal. In a moment of stunning honesty and humanity, we see how the speaker will want to remember this moment: in the best possible light. But therein lies the rub: we do not know how the other road would have turned out; we can never know. It is this that haunts so much of human experience: the question of what could have been.

This question is the issue of the poem. We want to make our own choices; we want to believe that life is somehow rational and the less traveled path will work in our favor. But we cannot know. We can only pick a path and hope. To some this might be depressing, but for me this is liberating. Pick a path and go with it. It will not be the only time you come to such a crossroad. When you get to another one, pick again. This poem encourages me to get over my arrogance that says I can figure this out on my own and make my own go of things. As a wise man once said, “In their hearts humans plan their course, but the Lord establishes their steps” (Proverbs 16:9).

Happy choosing, friends.