Tom Asacker posts a YouTube video that I found quite interesting. I hope you will too.
One immediate application for the voiceover world? Sometimes the best way to read a script isn’t the obvious choice. What are your thoughts? Comments are, as always, open.
I left this comment for the video’s creator at his website:
Hi, Josh.
I think the feeling of the poem speaks for itself; it is not meant ironically. The key to the conundrum you pose seems to be in statements that the selected road is “less traveled” but “worn more or less the same”.
I believe you have given up too easily on the question of how it can it be less traveled, but worn the same. Obviously the feet of the travelers on this road must have born down more firmly – one of the middle stanzas of “America the Beautiful” tells of the Pilgrims’ feet having “stern, impassioned stress.”
One solution could be that the people walking this road were the giants – men and women who leave massive footprints seen for generations – those who “leave their mark”… though sometimes that mark is obscured to the unobservant by the leaves of everyday clutter.
Thanks for the thought-provoking video.
Dan,
Interesting insights. Thanks for adding to the conversation.
Be well,
Bob
Bob,
Thank *you* for the awesome site!
IMO it would be hard for someone in early 20th-century America to hear a poem about two roads, one more and one less traveled, without thinking of Jesus’ words in Matthew 7:13,14 – the broad and the narrow ways (roads).
And the audience of Frost’s day might be less comfortable with a major unresolved contradiction than a post-modern reader like Josh.
But no scholarly analysis I’ve read on the web deals with these “cultural context” issues. Amusingly, one commentator even tells us that the “grass wanting wear” is an anthropomorphism – apparently unaware that “to want” originally meant “to lack”; not “to desire”.
Is there a lesson for voice actors? Maybe two: when reading for meaning, “Context is Everything”, including the context outside the page; and, as Manhattan Project scientist Richard Feynman said, “Doubt the experts.”
dp
Dan,
Your lessons for voice actors are spot on the money. Thank you again for the cogent analysis.
Be well,
Bob