If the myth of the independent pilgrim was part of the myth of America, it was also part of a Christian idea of spiritual progress and redemption. Frost, however, saw this Christian pilgrimage in terms of torture, suffering, and uncertainty, a trial testing faith to its limits. Such is the way “The Trial by Existence” concludes, a poem in which life takes on meaning only through “earthly woe” and “agony of strife” without even the heroic pride of wisdom and choice:

But always God speaks at the end:
“One thought in agony of strife
The bravest would have by for friend,
The memory that he chose the life;
But the pure fate to which you go
Admits no memory of choice,
Or the woe were not earthly woe
To which you give the asserating voice.”

Meaningful spiritual experience for Frost recognizes the limits of reason and the need to find “The mystic link to bind and hold/Spirit to matter till death come.” What comes after death cannot be known, otherwise spiritual struggle would be hollow. The poem concludes with a terrifying recognition of the way life’s trials destroy pride but still underscores our mysterious responsibility for what “we somehow chose”:

’Tis of the essence of life here,
Though we choose greatly, still to lack
The lasting memory at all clear,
That life has for us on the wrack
Nothing but what we somehow chose;
Thus are we wholly stripped of pride
In the pain that has but one close,
Bearing it crushed and mystified.

The meaning of that “one close” hardly guarantees redemption; in earth or in heaven, we “find that the utmost reward/Of daring should be still to dare.” The self-assured march of “The Trial by Existence” into uncertainty and the bewilderment of being “mystified” foreshadows the tensions and ironies of Frost’s most famous pilgrimage poem, “The Road Not Taken.” The drama of choosing direction at a crossroads is a commonplace, but Frost’s poem evokes the agonies of similar scenes in the Bible, Sophocles, Dante, Dickinson (poem 615, with “that odd Fork in Being’s Road”), as well as Thoreau’s faith in the magnetism of nature in his essay “Walking.” How much choice is there when we learn that both roads had been worn about the same, not to mention that they already exist as paths and that they are covered with leaves? The speaker will not know until “ages and ages hence” what “difference,” if any, has been made—only retrospect gives the sense of destiny or of design. And the speaker will be telling it with “a sigh,” perhaps as much from pain as from relief, as much for regret about the road not taken as for the road he took.