Pathways

Tonight I watched the second episode of the new TV series, Heroes. It's about ordinary people suddenly manifesting extraordinary talents; hang-ups and problems thereof; the problems of selfhood, personality, awareness, and adaptation.

I also found drawn to two poems. The first is by Robert Frost - it is his famous one about 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.

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That poem was published in 1916, ninety years and three generations ago. It has somehow become immortal, for we will always have to make decisions about roads and choices between them. And yet, there are older and sadder poems about roads too. Here is one which has proven less immortal, but which has a message just as poignant. It is Kipling's 1910 poem (yes, it is older than Frost's by six years), The Way Through The Woods:

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods.
But there is no road through the woods.

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And of course, it is the blind travelling on a road now lost that is the saddest thing here. I haven't yet decided which poem I love more. Perhaps it will be just as difficult for you, my readers.