EthicalDative

In an essay, Meghan O’Rourke writes the following:

Ambivalence is, like so much poetry, paratactic. (Poetry, June 2024)

Ambivalence is a state of mind characterized by mixed feelings. Parataxis is a rhetorical move. It daisy-chains independent clauses, leaving it to the reader to intuit their relationships. I came. I saw. I conquered. Its opposite, hypotaxis, introduces dependent clauses into the mix, which “can bolster the meaning of a work.” Poems forego such bolstering by flaring off fussy back story.

O’Rourke invites attention to the ending of a famous Frost poem — never mind which one. She focuses on the line break which repeats “I“ across the enjambment. “These final rousing lines enact a kind of ambivalent epistemic stutter… that often goes unremarked,” she writes. If all that can be said about the choice not to lead a certain existence is that it “has made all the difference,” that line is “trickily ambivalent: is the difference good or bad?” she muses.”

Would “trickily ambiguous” have been a better descriptor of Frost’s line? (I hear you say it’s a distinction without a difference.) In distilling its contemplations, poetry augments cognitive load on the reader. In the best of cases it earns the right to do so; the reader’s exertions add value to the poem. Hell, let’s agree on this: A poem without a good reader is a breathless tuba.

Here’s where I land on the epistemic stutter gone unremarked: Frost doesn’t need for us to know. Or rather, Frost needs for us not to know. Imagine he had jotted the following in a pocket notebook where he kept his ideas:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I stood contemplating which one to take. One looked heavily traveled, judging by the ruts; but the other path looked as if it hadn’t been traversed in months, which appealed to my instinct for discovery. I took the one less traveled by, because I was footloose and fancy free back then — just wanted to stretch my wings and see some country — and that has made all the difference. Why and how? Because I met my future wife when I spent the night in that little lodge on Lake Pottawatomie. If I hadn’t made that flippant decision to go one way and not another, I wouldn’t bask in the love of that good woman today.

Now imagine the road taken.

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