Yet if the word “cautious” is wrong, it’s interestingly wrong. “The Road Not Taken” seems to be about the difficulty of decision making but is itself strangely reluctant to resolve. It keeps us in the woods, at the crossroads, unsure whether the speaker is actually even making a choice, and then ends not with the decision itself but with a claim about the future that seems unreliable. There is, in this sense, no road that “The Road Not Taken” fails to take. Is that desire to cover all possibilities “cautious”? Here it’s useful to turn to another poem from Frost’s early career, “Reluctance.” That poem ends:

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

The conclusion of the poem is a protest against conclusions—an argument, you might say, for delay. But it’s not an argument for caution, even though caution and delay are intertwined. After all, a stubborn sensibility also delays. A playful sensibility delays. An arrogant sensibility delays, because it won’t be rushed. And while Frost can claim the greatest self-penned epitaph in the history of English-language poetry—I HAD A LOVER’S QUARREL WITH THE WORLD—it would have been no less accurate for his stone to have read STUBBORN, PLAYFUL, AND ARROGANT. Or even HE NEVER HURRIED.

“The Road Not Taken” isn’t a poem that radiates this sort of confidence, obviously. But there is an overlap between its hesitations and evasions and the extent to which Frost, as a poet, simply doesn’t like to leave the page. Here is Frost from an interview with The Paris Review in 1960, talking about the act of writing:

The whole thing is performance and prowess and feats of association. Why don’t critics talk about those things—what a feat it was to turn that that way, and what a feat it was to remember that, to be reminded of that by this? Why don’t they talk about that? Scoring. You’ve got to score.

Poetry is frequently (endlessly, tediously) compared to music, but only rarely does one see it compared to ice hockey. Yet here is Frost—“You’ve got to score”—doing exactly that. This is of a piece with his famous quip that writing free verse is “like playing tennis without a net,” a bon mot that is probably more interesting for its underlying metaphor (poets, those sedentary creatures, are like sportsmen) than for its actual claim. There is a sinewy, keyed-up athleticism to Frost’s writing and, like all great athletes, he’s reluctant to leave the field, which is, after all, the place he’s most fully himself. Consider the end of his great love poem “To Earthward”:

When stiff and sore and scarred

I take away my hand

From leaning on it hard