Both poems rely on the image of an unreliable road that is imperfectly understood by its traveler. “Directive” contains a guide, true, but that guide “only has at heart your getting lost” and may be understood not just as the poet leading the reader, but as a past version of the same traveler guiding the current version. (Read this way, in the line “Back out of all this now too much for us,” the “us” becomes a variant of the royal “we.”) But the most important overlap between the two poems occurs in the hypnotic concluding lines of “Directive.” The guide tells us that he has hidden “a broken drinking goblet like the Grail” so that “the wrong ones can’t find it, / So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.” Frost is referring to Mark 4:11–12, in which Jesus explains why he speaks in parables:

And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

For Frost, these lines were equally applicable to poetry, which some people would simply never understand, and which even good readers needed to approach in the right way. A poem, then, becomes a way to separate an audience into factions.

The same idea emerges in two ways in “The Road Not Taken.” First, as discussed earlier, the speaker focuses solely on the amount of travel each road received (rather than on the roads’ relative steepness or narrowness and so forth), which means his selection between them involves separating himself from other people. The road isn’t just a choice; it’s a choice premised on exclusion. Second, that choice is mirrored in the larger subterfuges of the poem itself, in the way it encourages interpretations, only to undercut them, separating readers into those who thought they understood, others who thought those readers didn’t understand, and so on in a nearly endless cycle. As Frost wrote to Louis Untermeyer, “I’ll bet not half a dozen people can tell who was hit and where he was hit by my Road Not Taken.”

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BUT AS WE’VE SEEN, “who was hit and where he was hit” is nearly impossible to determine. This is because “The Road Not Taken” isn’t a joke but a poem. A joke (or trick) has a right answer, but a poem only has answers that are better or worse—a point that is relevant to the most important connection between “Directive” and “The Road Not Taken.” Recall the beginning of the latter poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler . . .

And recall the conclusion of “Directive”: