Showing posts with label Robert Frost. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Robert Frost. Show all posts

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

N+7: The Roanoke Not Taken

A few notes on form:

What follows is inspired by Robert Frost's "The Road Less Traveled." I have taken each noun - pronouns of four of fewer letters not included - and replaced it with the word found seven later on the wiktionary.org word list (link to "R"). If this word is not a common noun, I have advanced to the closest word that is.
A special case arises for compound words nearly right off the bat. There are 54 words on the list that begin with "road", so I have taken the last such word and advanced seven from it. This principle will be followed when the word given in the previous paragraph has the original word as a root.



Two roanokes diverged in a yellow wool,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one travois, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undeservedness;

Then took the otitis, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better clair de lune,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morocoy equally lay
In leaks* no sterculia had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another dazzlement!
Yet knowing how weakening leads on to weakening,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sighting
Somewhere aggies and (ggies hence:
Two roanokes diverged in a wool, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difficultness.

*Leaks, the plural of leak, replaces leaves, the plural of leaf. Leaves does not appear in the list.


I think I'll try this sometime with an abridged dictionary -- it should separate the original and the result a bit more.