I’m memorizing one poem a month. I learned Mary Oliver’s The Journey last month. The first couple of days I worked on it I felt like I was never going to get it. Then I kept at it, and it just clicked. And I found myself saying it out loud to myself as I walked, as I drove, as I did errands and chores. It’s been a delight to have it just there, in my mind, ready to summon. I even recited it out loud at the end of a presentation I did for a group of college freshmen because it fit so well with what I was sharing with them.

So, this month I chose probably the most famous American poem, Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken. There were actually a couple more Mary Oliver poems I was tempted to add to do a deep dive into her work, but I’m opting for Frost instead. It is a classic, and the rhyming structure is more traditional and hopefully easier to memorize than Oliver’s prose style. Choosing this one, though, is choosing, in opposition somewhat to the point of it, one of the most well traveled poems in the English language. But classics are classic for a reason, and it seems appropriate to add this one to the so far very little library of poetry in my mind.

From Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation by Roger Housden