I am sharing Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” by the American poet, as a source of reflection. I realized that Robert Kiyosaki mentions it in Rich Dad Poor Dad as one of his favorites and reread it countless times to draw lessons about life.
Kiyosaki’s situation resembles the dilemma in the poem: he had to choose between two different paths, following the guidance of his poor dad or his rich dad. At age nine, he chose his rich dad’s path, and his father guided him until he was thirty-nine. At the time, the choice was painful, but it ultimately shaped the course of his life.
Unlike the speaker in the poem, after completing his financial learning journey, Kiyosaki looks back and reaffirms the final line: “and that has made all the difference.” It is important to highlight this distinction because in the poem the line is spoken at the moment the speaker makes his choice, as an aspiration projected into the future.
To better understand the poem, we need to know its origins. Frost lived in England from 1912 to 1915, where he became close friends with Edward Thomas. During one of their walks, they came upon two roads. Thomas was unsure which one to take and, in retrospect, regretted not choosing the other. Inspired by this scene, after returning to New Hampshire in 1915, Frost sent him an early copy of “The Road Not Taken.”
The poem explores a choice between two possible paths. Once we choose one, it becomes inevitable to imagine what the other might have been like, even if at first they seemed similar. Since in reality we cannot take both, the speaker ends by looking ahead and considering that he chose the less-traveled path: the one that, in his view, made all the difference. The message is clear: when faced with an irreversible decision, we must give meaning to the path we chose.
Behind the poem are longing and uncertainty, perhaps even regret, along with the need to make sense of the path the speaker chose.
Therefore, if we pay attention, we see that the poem is less about knowing which path was better and more about the need to construct meaning after making a choice. It reveals a fork in the road, the anguish of imagining the road not taken, and finally the attempt to overcome that unease by giving meaning to the decision. After all, once a choice is made, human limitations allow us only to move forward, even as our thoughts continue to wander along the road we did not choose, ironically emphasized right in the poem’s title.
Kiyosaki seems to have found in the poem the clarity to choose, face hardship, and give meaning to the path he took. His decision, painful in childhood, became a legacy when he shared in Rich Dad Poor Dad a path to financial education that had previously been invisible to the general public. A dilemma of choice can exist only when we can see the other path, and Kiyosaki opened up that possibility by sharing his experience.
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
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.
Reflecting further on the anguish that arises when we imagine possibilities we did not choose and can no longer pursue because there is no turning back, I suggest reading a classic of Brazilian poetry: “I’m Going Away to Pasargadae” by Manuel Bandeira.
I’m Going Away to Pasargadae
I’m going away to Pasargadae,
There I am friend to the king.
There my bride is waiting all day,
Watching and wearing my ring.
I’m going away to Pasargadae,
I cannot be happy here.
I must adventure my life and go,
My reason for leaving I know:
My bride won’t be happy until I am near
And my kisses allay all her fear.
My reason for living I know.
I shall tie myself to masts.
I’ll unicycle the rigging.
I’ll dive from masthead mermaids
And swim back around to the stern.
I shall make a shark my pet!
And when I am weary
I’ll gently beach the boat
And summon all the sea-maids
To sing me poesies,
Paeans in praise of her,
My bride who counts the days.
I’m going away to Pasargadae.
In Pasargadae I’ve everything,
There I my riches keep.
My seventeen children
A mother-in-law
My parents also are there,
And every good I’ve gathered
I’ve shipped through those golden gates
‘Neath the wall where my lover waits.
And whenever I am sad
(This journey is sure to be long)
When at night the dread of dying
Before I arrive arrives
– There I am friend to the king –
I think on the woman I want
In the bed we built together.
I’m going away to Pasargadae.
First, let us look at the reality and context that may have led Manuel Bandeira to write this poem. In I’m Going Away to Pasargadae, we can identify many of the poet’s own fears; his life was limited by the consequences of tuberculosis that had not been properly cured.
The literary scholar Alfredo Bosi suggests: “The adolescent poorly cured of tuberculosis persists in the solitary adult who watches the carnival of life from afar and turns everything into material for the free rhythms of his enforced detachment.”
Manuel Bandeira himself said the following about his poem:
“It was the poem with the longest gestation in all my work. I first saw the name Pasargadae when I was sixteen, and it was in a Greek author (…) That name, Pasargadae, which means ‘field of the Persians,’ stirred in my imagination a fabulous landscape, a country of delights (…) more than twenty years later, when I was living alone in my house on Curvelo street, in a moment of deep discouragement, of the most acute awareness of everything I had not done in my life because of the illness, that absurd cry suddenly leapt from my subconscious: ‘I’m going away to Pasargadae!’”
With this context in mind, we can see that Manuel Bandeira gave form to his anguish and dissatisfaction with his limited reality by writing the poem. Its central theme is the speaker’s desire to escape to another dimension, even if only through imagination: a place of limitless pleasure, free of consequences, independent, and supported by childhood memories of maternal figures. Although this place is not perfect, it offers one assurance: in moments of sadness, the speaker, as a friend of the king, has no reason to remain in suffering.
Comparing I’m Going Away to Pasargadae with The Road Not Taken, we can see that Manuel Bandeira’s anguish over his lack of options, caused by his restricted life, was so intense that the only possible path was to create a parallel reality through poetry. Despite these limitations, Bandeira managed to give meaning to his existence, at least through art, creating a narrative of escape and hope. In this contrast, the dilemma in The Road Not Taken seems less severe, since its speaker is fully able to choose and accept the consequences, giving meaning to the path he decides to follow.
Viktor Frankl, the founder of logotherapy, stated that human beings can endure any pain except the pain of having no meaning. In Bandeira’s work, meaning arises from imagining a refuge, even without the possibility of following a real path. In Robert Frost’s poem, despite the doubt about whether the alternative path might have been better, meaning comes from understanding that what matters is embracing the choice we made.
By placing one poem alongside the other, we see that the weight of Bandeira’s limitations diminishes any anguish about whether we chose the right path. After all, as mentioned earlier, it is more important to give meaning to our own path, callings, and vocations than to lose ourselves in questions unrelated to the meaning we have built, even though having such doubts is human and entirely possible.
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