Although Liz and I watch only one TV program — House — our lack of cable TV service makes it hard to keep up with that show. Until recently, we relied on my brother-in-law to “TiVo” it, and we’d watch it on evenings when we invited ourselves over for dinner. Then my sister gave me an iTunes gift card for my birthday, which allowed us to reduce the frequency of our “militant yet lazy houseguest” visits by downloading episodes onto our computer.
This past week, we made it through our entire backlog of old episodes. Now what? We decided to sample some earlier work of House cast member Robert Sean Leonard — specifically the movie Dead Poets Society. I really liked it overall, which made me all the more upset that protagonist John Keating (played by Robin Williams) is guilty of one of my pet peeves: quoting the final lines of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” as if completely oblivious to the overall meaning of the poem.
Maybe I’m being overprotective of Frost’s words, since I grew up in Vermont, which claims him as one of its own (though New Hampshire and Massachusetts might disagree). But really, if you make a film about an inspiring teacher with a profound understanding of poetry, and if the erudite instructor, in urging his students to find their own voice, offers up a few stirring lines of poetry in support of that notion, is it too much to ask that he recite an excerpt whose sentiment is not completely undercut by the poem from which it comes?
If you are considering using the last two or three lines of “The Road Not Taken” as part of your email signature or home page or yearbook profile or graduation speech, please read and think about the whole poem — all 20 lines, reprinted below — before heading down that particular road.
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.
My Track Record 
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