The Road Not Taken

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim                             ,Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —

I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

On our trip back from Boston we came to an exit that advertised the farm of famous unofficial "poet laureate" Robert Frost's so we decided since all the snow was melted we'd go over and check it out.  As we often find at sites like this it is only open in the summer so we will stop back by next year to see the inside.  

Born in 1874 in California Robert Frost moved to Massachusetts when he was 12 years old.  He met and married his high school sweetheart in Lawrence, Massachusetts.  They had six children.  Two suffered from mental illness, two died in early childhood and two grew to adulthood.  His grandfather bought them a house in Derry, New Hampshire where they lived from 1900 to 1911 and although he wrote poetry during that time he wasn't able to make a living at it.  In 1912 they sold the farm and moved to England at which time he was able to publish two books and that made all the difference.  When he returned to America he was able to find publishers willing to publish his poetry and he became famous in the United States.  They settled in Franconia, NH and he taught for the next 40 years at Dartmouth, University of Michigan, and Amherst College.  He received 4 Pulitzer Prizes and was asked to recite one of his poems at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy.  He died in 1963.