Thomas is not being entirely fair here, for Frost’s poem is more than a
little complex about choice, and certainly not the hymn to individual self-
reliance that patriotic Emersonians have sometimes wished it might be. It
presents its life-defining decision as one without particularly good reason
(‘the passing there / Had worn them both about the same’), which under-
mines the rationality of the choice, and thus thoroughly ironises the idea
that taking the independent, hard-working ‘road less traveled’ makes all the
difference, for the poem’s conclusion becomes then a piece of retrospective
self-justification.^74 On the poem’s logic, taking the roadmoretravelled
would also have made all the difference. But for Thomas, the issue was not
the reasons for choosing, but whether poetry and the life it represented was
really anything to do with freedom of choice at all. For if one could choose
to be a poet, then Pater would have been a better writer; knowing he was
not, ‘Words’ prays ‘Choose me / You English words’. Thomas’s perpetual
self-qualification makes uncertainty a baffling of the independent self
implicit in choosing. ‘If there be a flaw in that heaven’ remarks the second
voice in ‘The Signpost’, ‘’Twill be freedom to wish’, and the poem presents
a bewildering list of alternatives that might be wished for:
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth
At any age between death and birth
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, the land and the sea,
Summer, Autumn, Winter, Spring...The choices are so various as to be indifferent; innotdeciding between
them, though, the situation remains as placeless and timeless as the
mystics of ‘Ecstasy’, particularly in that last line which resembles the
ecstatic moment of ‘The Lane’ where all seasons are present at once.
The same point is made in ‘Liberty’, where the tortuous syntax makes
liberty indistinguishable from its opposite:
If every hour
Like this one passing that I have spent among
The wiser others when I have forgot
To wonder whether I was free or not,
Were piled before me, and not lost behind,
And I could take and carry them away
I should be rich; or if I had the power
To wipe out every one and not again
Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.100 British Poetry in the Age of Modernism