He expects that years from now he’ll look back and claim it made a big difference. He says he will also claim it was the road less traveled by, for all that the passing there had worn them the same and so forth. It may well make a big difference, but of what nature no-one knows.
Yes, I understand that what the poem says is that he’ll say it made a big difference, rather than that it did. But there’s a difference between not saying it’s a real difference and saying it’s not a real difference; it seems to me that the former is what Frost does and the latter is what ArisKatsaris says he does.
(My reading of the to-ing and fro-ing about whether the road is “less traveled by” is that the speaker’s initial impression is that one path is somewhat untrodden, and he picks it on those grounds; on reflection he’s not sure it’s actually any less trodden than the other, but his intention was to take the less-travelled road; and later on he expects to adopt the shorthand of saying that he picked the less-travelled one. I don’t see that any actual dishonesty is intended, though perhaps a certain lack of precision.)
He expects that years from now he’ll look back and claim it made a big difference. He says he will also claim it was the road less traveled by, for all that the passing there had worn them the same and so forth. It may well make a big difference, but of what nature no-one knows.
Yes, I understand that what the poem says is that he’ll say it made a big difference, rather than that it did. But there’s a difference between not saying it’s a real difference and saying it’s not a real difference; it seems to me that the former is what Frost does and the latter is what ArisKatsaris says he does.
(My reading of the to-ing and fro-ing about whether the road is “less traveled by” is that the speaker’s initial impression is that one path is somewhat untrodden, and he picks it on those grounds; on reflection he’s not sure it’s actually any less trodden than the other, but his intention was to take the less-travelled road; and later on he expects to adopt the shorthand of saying that he picked the less-travelled one. I don’t see that any actual dishonesty is intended, though perhaps a certain lack of precision.)