Two roads diverged in a wood: Robert Frost

Louis B. Jones pens a great essay on Robert Frost, which thankfully The Threepenny Review puts on-line. 

Here are two gems from it, set together: 

It seldom occurs to me, frankly, to contemplate any of the thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird; nor could I recite from memory more than a few lines of “Four Quartets,” poems which on the Truth-Beauty Meter (or the Ambition Meter) must score up there near the Tao Te Ching and the Sermon on the Mount. I wonder if, in the dark times of my life, or the merely dim times, I’ve gotten more of real consolation and upbringing from Frost. Frost’s having been acquainted with the night; his temptation to pause a little too long in the dark, cold, futile woods; his letting a boughful of snow dump over his head and not worsen but improve his dreadful day; or just his thinking it’s important that a newborn calf “totters” when its mother licks it—all these homely considerations have come to rescue me often, in the real life I lead while my hand is on the hoe-handle or the steering wheel, my eye on the oncoming road, my ear attentive to NPR or just the valley winds. Moreover, in almost every Frost poem, there’s somewhere the encounter with darkness, darkness deepened and worsened, perversely, by putting on light versification’s frock.

Then into Frost's most famous poem: 

Frost used to speak with mockery of himself as “that poet of stone walls, birches, and belilaced cellar holes,” with a sarcasm licensed by the open secret of his career: that most of his work is about the terrors, death and meaninglessness and solitary inarticulacy. The temptation to linger which is offered by cold dark woods is not a lightsome one, it’s rather a desolate one. And anybody who will simply read the twenty lines about choosing the road less traveled will see that it’s not a boast of the poet’s own nonconformity, nor any kind of endorsement of nonconformity—not at all. It’s an admission that no existential decision of ours really ever makes any “difference.”

But even if said ironically, how can "I took the one less traveled by/and that has made all the difference" be dismissed? The music transcends the philosophy.