In addition to the Ford commercial, “The Road Not Taken” has been used in advertisements for Mentos, Nicorette, the multibillion-dollar insurance company AIG, and the job-search Web site, which deployed the poem during Super Bowl XXXIV to great success. Its signature phrases have become so ubiquitous, so much a part of everything from coffee mugs to refrigerator magnets to graduation speeches, that it’s almost possible to forget the poem is actually a poem. It’s “The Road Not Taken,” and it plays a unique role not simply in American literature, but in American culture -and in world culture as well. Lucy Scholes’s column about forgotten booksīut this isn’t just any poem. Robert’s Frost’s Writers at Work interview Looking for something else to read? How about … For an audience of car buyers in New Zealand to recognize a hundred-year-old poem from a country eight thousand miles away is something else entirely. For any mass audience to recognize any poem is (to put it mildly) unusual. In the commercial, this fact is never announced the audience is expected to recognize the poem unaided. It is, of course, “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Here is what is read by a voice-over artist, in the distinctive vowels of New Zealand, as the young man ponders his choice: But there is one very unusual aspect to this commercial. And it is, in most respects, a normal piece of smartly assembled and quietly manipulative product promotion. The advertisement I’ve just described ran in New Zealand in 2008. As the car pulls away and the screen is lit with gold-for it’s a commercial we’ve been watching-the emblem of the Ford Motor Company briefly appears. The man smiles slightly, as if confident in the life he’s chosen and happy to lend that confidence to a fellow traveler. As a car slows to pick him up, we realize the driver is the original man from the crossroads, only now he’s accompanied by a lovely woman and a child. The series resolves at last into a view of a different young man, with his thumb out on the side of a road. As he hesitates, images from possible futures flicker past: the young man wading into the ocean, hitchhiking, riding a bus, kissing a beautiful woman, working, laughing, eating, running, weeping. He pauses, his hands in his pockets, and looks back and forth between his options. That too (like this one)is a poem that teaches about self-reliance and not necessarily following where others have led or gone.From The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong, a new book by David Orr.Ī young man hiking through a forest is abruptly confronted with a fork in the path. The poem that comes to mind is Jyodi tore dakshone keyo na ashey,tauhe ekla chalo. This poem brings to mind another great poem and song of an Indian poet-Rabindranath Tagore,who also wrote our national anthem! It is about not having a ‘herd mentality’ and to be able to think and decide for oneself-independently,regardless of the ways and customs of others.These choices, can make all the difference to our future. This is a poem that teaches us about about individuality and non-conformism. However,the whole poem (within it’s simplicity) has a deep metaphoric philosophy and significance. This is a poem by the Robert Frost,the American Poet.On the surface ,it seems to be a simple poem about a man waking in the woods and takes the road lesser used or ‘less trodden’ path.Something that can happen to anyone on an ordinary walk. Q: what does this poem ‘ road not taken’ teach us?
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