Orange is the New Black is, well, the new black on Netflix, although Piper Chapman needs a few more seasons, or at least a few more fiction-months behind bars, before she approaches being anywhere near as nuanced as Walter White, who has taken five seasons to travel one fiction-year. But among her many virtues, she is an astute reader of poetry, or at least took good notes in college. Slate has the lowdown on her explication of Frost’s “Road Not Taken,” where she schools some fellow prisoners on its ironic sentimentality. “Ah shit, we about to get educated and shit,” Taystee says.
The poem was first misread in Frost’s own lifetime, and Frost sometimes seemed proud of this fact. “I’ll bet not half a dozen people can tell you who was hit and where he was hit in my Road Not Taken,” he told the poet and editor Louis Untermeyer. The poem, he explained, was “really about his friend Edward Thomas, who when they walked together always castigated himself for not having taken another path than the one they took.” (That’s from William Pritchard’s Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered.) In 1925, he told another reader that the poem “was my rather private jest at the expense of those who might think I would yet live to be sorry for the way I had taken in life.” Thomas, for his part, thought no one would get it: “I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing,” he told Frost, “without showing them and advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.”