John McAllister
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Picture

The Road Not Taken

7/20/2014

2 Comments

 
Picture
For whatever reason today, I googled "Robert Frost public domain." To my excitement, I found that "The Road Not Taken" is actually in the public domain!! This poem has always been one of my favorites and despite the fact that it has probably been set to music many times, I plan on setting it myself. I can remember years ago reading about how Eric Whitacre had originally set Sleep to a Robert Frost poem and the words had to be changed due to copyright laws. Apparently, anything Frost published before 1923 is in the public domain. Great news. It has been quite a while since I wrote a choral piece, so this will be a great adventure for me. Maybe I'll go sit in the woods and read the poem a few times. 

"The Road Not Taken" (1916)

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.

2 Comments
Dale Raby
1/10/2021 04:41:30 am

So... did you ever write the song? I've got a few short stories based on this poem awaiting time for me to set type to it and start pulling the operating handle on my press.

Mostly I print short runs of "chap books"... maybe a hundred copies or so at most, and thought I might include The Road Not Taken in both stories.

Yes, the late Tim Raby, musician from New York was my younger brother.

Reply
Kavitha link
11/26/2021 09:56:50 am

Narration of the poem is very much metaphoric with our real life situation; we also get stuck up in making choices where there are confusingly similar choices available to us. The beautiful portrayal of human mind when it is in sheer indecisive state has never been done better than Robert L Frost. What a voluminous book could not convey, a poem of having couple of stanza has done. How strange is it that despite having progressed so much as a civilization, our mind still works similar to how it worked when the poem was penned down. CONSISTENCY of MIND !!!

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