| "But I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep" |
| Penultimate lines of Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". In the poem, a man on his way home from a New England village stops his horse and buggy on a road bordered by woods on one side and a lake on the other. He watches the snow falling. It is so quiet and so beautiful that he is tempted to stop there forever. His horse, however, gives the harness bells a shake. The sound wakes the man to his duty. He has promises to keep and miles to go before he can "sleep". Frost says that sometimes we long for the peace and stillness of death, but life's responsibilities and opportunities call to us. ********* "Road Not Taken, The" A lyric poem by Robert Frost, the last three lines of which are: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--- I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference. These lines refer to the choices we make at every step of our lives and to the consequences of those choices. We cannot help wondering how our lives would have differed had we taken other paths, and especially had we taken the less conventional road. ~Facts on File Dictionary of Historical and Cultural Allusions. |
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