Two roads diverged into a snowy wood...

Robert Frost in 1941

Photo by Fred Palumbo

World Telegram Staff Photographer

(Image from Wikipedia)

... or so I remembered as a child, but children misremember, too.

Robert Frost is one of the few great poets whose poems can be read, understood, and liked by even a child. I recall at age 8 or 9 reading his somewhat overquoted poem, "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 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.

Even as a child, I sensed that the poem was about more than just some obscure, natural garden of forking paths, though I probably didn't conceive, nor even hint to myself, more abstractly of a "forking in time, not in space." But I was old enough to understand that a choice could not be recalled when a moment was gone, though that's a lesson that we learn with deepening regrets as the moments that held our choices recede into a past that we can merely recall but never change.

Though my childhood memory of that road diverging in that snowy wood was a misremembering, perhaps Frost as poet was gazing into the same forest in "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening":

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.

Again, even as a child, I sensed that the woods conveyed more than just a winter scene, that some mysterious calling came from them, and though I misremembered, confusing this snowy wood with that other wood wherein a road diverged, I even to this day can't help thinking that there's some connection, that the wood and the woods are the same and that we stand, trees surrounding us, forever before a diverging road in a wood whose place and destination are the same, like an infinite labyrinth "whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere."

Though perhaps Frost didn't mean precisely this sort of Pascalian reflection.