There are reasons that the Lord of the Rings trilogy has spanned nearly one hundred years, allowing children to connect with their grandparents through their love of the tale, and that stories like Harry Potter have defined a generation: the story of a journey is one that audiences love to hear. Reading and watching about journeys can make the reader/watcher experience that journey with the characters. Journeys, however, do not have to be fantastical or magical to be powerful to a person. T.S. Eliot and Robert Frost, for example, were both modernist poets, but they were creators of journeys that seemed much simpler. This is not to say, however, that the journeys they wrote of were incredibly similar. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” both depict in first-person form physical journeys by the speakers, through a city and through the woods, respectively, but also the metaphorical journey taken through life. The speakers of each of these poems are in different stages of their life-journeys, which provides them each with a different perspective. The speakers also have very different attitude to their journeys, showing that the stage and setting of a journey can greatly affect how that journey is perceived by the journeyer.
These poems have radically different settings, which sets the tone for each of the pieces. In Frost’s poem, the speaker finds himself one morning in a “yellow wood” (1), and no other people are apparently present. Both of the roads are “grassy” (8) and have “leaves no step had trodden black” (12), which implies that the roads are generally not traveled very frequently, and certainly not very recently. In Eliot’s poem, it is nighttime, which is likened to a “pat...
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...hoices, Eliot shows the opposite outcome of depression and regret from a lifetime of indecision. Whether it is a far-away land of fantastical beings, the woods down the street, or perhaps the nearest city, a journey will always yield a different experience, and indecision is just as much a decision as any other. Choosing to remain inactive in a world that calls for action is to choose to grow old and have nothing of substance to look back on, since nothing was ever done.
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First of all, the The Lord of the Rings-trilogy contains the beautiful and is original, not for the present day, but for its literary standards of its time, when epic fantasy was not nearly as frequently written as in this day. Avid readers of fantasy claim the book to be unoriginal, since it follows the structure of Joseph Campbell’s monomyth or the Hero’s Journey. The Hero’s Journey is a predetermined structure, based on the typical epic fantasy adventure. It typically consists of a cycle of twelve stages, depending on which variant is used, (Campbell 391) and each story contains at least some the same standard archetypical characters. Examples of these are the hero, like Frodo, the magician, like Gandalf, and the trickster, a humorous sidekick like Sam. This trilogy concerns the journey of these heroes, as they se...
...us hate through the symbols of fire and ice. The narrator chooses fire over ice because it’s the most relatable for them and is, in his or her mind, preferable to the hate and coldness of ice. The narrator in “The Road Not Taken” also makes a decision based on how the choices presented relate to them. They chose to be an individual and not to shape their life around someone else’s decision. “Fire and Ice” is, at a deeper level, also very different from “The Road Not Taken” because it presents two specific choices that both lead to the same end while “The Road Not Taken” opens up the possibility for endless paths and decisions with an unknown result. Regardless of where the poems guide the narrator, Frost makes it clear that our decisions affect who we are, but also opens up speculation about what it would be like had we taken different turns. It’s impossible to know.
Frost’s poems will be read for many years to come and will always make the reader think before going onto another poem because that’s how different Frost’s poems are compared to other poet’s. Frost makes readers think outside the box and uses his personal life in most of his poems so the reader can understand where he is coming from. Without poems like “The Mending Wall” or “The Road Not Taken” we wouldn’t think of looking into a situation more closely. Frost had changed the literary world and we will still be learning and trying to understand all of his astonishing poems for years to come.