Compare And Contrast Blanche Farley And The Road Not Taken

Comparing Farley and Frost Blanche Farley, the author of “The Lover Not Taken”, written in 1984, wrote her poem as a parody to Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, published in 1951. In the original poem, the author states that the poem’s narrator has to choose between two paths, the road that is easy, open and wide, or the one that is chosen less and walked on less. In Farley's parodistic spin on Frost’s poem, she instead allows the narrator to chose both ‘paths’, instead she is referring to men, both her lover, Jack, and a new blonde man. “The Lover Not Taken” has many similar poetic elements to “The Road Not Taken”, also both poems have a theme to tell the reader to live their life to the fullest. Both poems share similar subjects that try to convey to the reader that they are to choose the right path, whether in simple daily tasks, like picking which path to walk on, or decisions that are life-changing, like supposedly cheating on your lover. While reading the two poems alongside each other, one can assume that Farley had a copy of “The Road Not Taken” as she was writing because the stanzas line up, some of the vocabulary matches up word for word, and they share a similar rhyme scheme. …show more content…
She takes each stanza, and changes it to fit her storyline, but in a way that still aligns perfectly with the primary. Farley's parody does shed some more light how an individual can perceive Frosts poem, she does this by applying the lesson learned from his poem, and writes a realistic, but possibly fictitious event that can be compared to something as mundane as an individual trying to choose what path to walk