Meaning

The line delivers a simple but demanding piece of advice: when you are in the middle of difficulty, the only reliable route to relief is to keep moving forward and pass through the experience rather than try to escape around it. Avoidance may feel safer, but it tends to leave problems intact. Endurance and forward motion, however hard they feel in the moment, are what actually lead somewhere.

Context

This line comes from a dramatic monologue in which a woman speaks at length about the weariness and confinement of her rural life. The poem as a whole is a quietly unsettling portrait of someone worn down by circumstance, which makes the line resonate with a particular weight. It reads partly as resigned wisdom and partly as the kind of thing a person tells themselves just to get through another day. Frost included it in his second full collection of poems, which helped establish his reputation as a major voice in American poetry.

About the author

Robert Frost was one of the most celebrated American poets of the twentieth century. Born in 1874, he spent much of his life in New England, and its landscapes and working lives shaped his verse throughout his career. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry four times, a record for his era. Though his poems often appear simple on the surface, they are widely studied for the emotional and philosophical depth beneath their plain language. He died in 1963.