Both Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” and Blanche Farley’s poem “The Lover Not Taken” deal with themes of choices, decisions, and consequences in ways that are similar yet very different.
Blanche Farley wrote her poem years after Robert Frost penned his, and there is a bit of a comical aspect to it. The speaker in Frost’s poem is traveling through a “yellow” wood on a crisp morning when he is faced with the decision of which path to take. The path is a metaphor for life. As readers of the poem know, he chooses the road that he sees as being "less traveled." In his last lines, he states:
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
In Farley’s poem, the female speaker is deciding between remaining loyal to an existing relationship with her male companion, or experimenting with a new “blond” lover. In both cases, the speakers ponder their choices knowing the rest of their lives will be affected. Farley says,
For if way led on and Jack
Found out, she doubted if he would ever come back.
The poems are written using similar word patterns, and literary techniques such as enjambment and rhyming schemes. Notice the use of the words “yellow” and “blonde” in the descriptions of the woods and the lover in question. Yet the poems differ. The female speaker is more lighthearted and fickle as she debates between the two lovers, while the speaker in Frost’s poem reflects more seriously. As Farley’s poem ends, the reader is left to wonder what happens when the speaker succumbs to her passion by calling the “blonde.”
Oh, she turned with a sigh.
Somewhere ages and ages hence,
She might be telling tis. "And I --
She would say, "stood faithfully by."
But by then who would know the difference?
With that in mind, she took the fast way home,
the road by the pond, and phoned the blond.
Both agree, that once the choice is made, there is no turning back; for better or worse, consequences will follow.
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