Robert Frost, and that potent em dash in his most misunderstood poem

Oh, the poor em dash. Often overused by writers like me, it’s now become a symbol of cheating, a giveaway that someone had an AI like ChatGPT whip up an essay for them.

Pity, because the em dash is a powerful bit of punctuation — particularly when used well. I do like using it, and am enough of a nerd to know that the name em dash comes from its width; it’s the same in typography as the letter M, just as the en dash is the width of the letter N. I also know my shortcuts — shift-option-dash on my Mac, Alt 0151 on a PC keyboard — so well that they’re second nature.

Today, I wanted to look at one of its most famous (and I think overlooked) uses of the em dash in American literature.

Robert Frost, who died in January 1963, is still a giant in literature. Today, I want to consider a part of his legacy — and the magnificently ambiguous gift he gave us with the use of punctuation.

Many people know the final words of his most famous poem The Road Not Taken:

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

It’s not uncommon for people to quote these two lines, perhaps to justify the particular path they’ve taken in life. There, in Frost’s words, is the defence people seek in the rear-view mirror, a literary beacon not unlike Paul Anka’s My Way, the song made most famous by Frank Sinatra.

Frost’s words have also been championed frequently as a nod — if not a call — to nonconformity. For instance, it’s the poem that Robin Williams’s character employs in a courtyard lesson, to persuade his preppy students in Dead Poets Society:

But that’s not really what the poem is about.

It’s not for nothing that author and biographer David Orr described The Road Not Taken as “the most misread poem in America.”

Let’s look again at the final five lines, and I’d like to draw attention to the third-last line, and its deliberate of punctuation:

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.

That “I,” and then an em dash, are just a couple of keystrokes in a fairly short poem, but they speak volumes. They actually say much by, for a moment, not saying anything.

There’s something there in that dash and the pause that it commands — it could be hesitancy, or maybe the act of decision-making itself, or a sliver of doubt before speaking the final words out loud. (Frost used the em dash in other poems, as well, and the technique is an example of a “hard caesura,” or a deliberate break in the meter or the text.)

In the end, Frost’s The Road Not Taken has so much more to say about how we live our lives, including the reckoning that comes with age about where we find ourselves. It’s the hindsight, not the choice itself in the moment, that provides meaning … to the poem, and to life itself.

To quote David Orr again:

The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives. 

So, yes, much depends on that mighty, reflective dash.