In grass and sand,

The hurt is not enough:

I long for weight and strength

To feel the earth as rough

To all my length.

Yes, these stanzas are about the hunger for sensation. But they’re also about delay: Frost wants to feel the friction of love through the “length” of his body, but also to the “length” of his days, and through the “length” of the poem. Not just more touch, but more time.

And here is where Robert Frost and Edward Thomas (or Frost’s idea of Thomas) are perhaps not so different. “The Road Not Taken” gives us several variations on the standard dilemmas associated with the romantic sensibility: How can one transcend one’s self (“travel both”) while still remaining oneself (“And be one traveler”)? How can one ever arrive anywhere if one is constantly reaching for something purer (“the one less traveled by”)? What is the difference between the stories we tell about ourselves and the actuality of our inner lives? In the moment of choosing—the moment of delay—all answers to these questions remain equally possible. But when a choice is made, other possibilities are foreclosed, which leads to what Frost describes as “crying over what might have been.” So the romantic embraces delay (“long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could”) because it postpones the inevitable loss. He hesitates like a candle flame wavers: hot but fragile, already wrapped in the smoke that will signal its extinction.

Both Frost and the speaker of “The Road Not Taken,” then, are attracted to the idea of prolonging the moment of decision making (achieving a “momentary stay against confusion,” as Frost would put it in a different context). The difference between them is one of attitude and degree. The speaker—and, by extension, Frost’s conception of Thomas—is afraid of what he’ll lose when the process of choosing ends, so he pauses over nearly any choice. Frost is afraid of losing the process itself, so he pauses over a decision that might result in genuine resolution—that might result, for instance, in a poem that is conclusive and immobile. He wants the ball to pass through the hoop, only to return to his hands, because for Frost the process—the continuation, the endless creation of endless roads—is everything. “No one,” he writes, “can really hold that the ecstasy should be static and stand still in one place.” You don’t just have to score; you have to keep scoring.

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