What might have been?
Like Frost's The Road Not Taken, John Greenleaf Whittier instead contemplates the road most taken. His poem Maud Muller is most famous for containing the lines "of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these; it might have been," but reading it it is more immersive than those lines might suggest. It also dispenses with the class divide in the name of love but also as a brief, escapist fantasy. Maud and her Judge saw in each other a missed opportunity to avoid the th