The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Overview of the Poem
• Walking in a wood and the road comes to a fork
• He stands a long time at the meeting of the two roads and looks down one path as far as he can but it disappears in the ‘undergrowth’ as it takes a bend
• He then considers the second path. He sees it is less worn and has more grass. The leaves are still untrodden so the paths remain fresh and exciting. It seems that he is the first traveller to pass this way for a while
• ‘long I stood’ shows that he contemplated the decision
• The persona begins to think about how he cannot take both paths and be the same “traveler”
• “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” Despite this wish he realizes he can never come back and take the untaken path because his choice will lead him in a different direction. He knows that “way leads on to way.” Realistically he doubts if he will ever come back because it is impossible to return to that place and make the same choice under similar circumstances because the original choice will have changed his life
• Frost realizes that had he taken the other road he would not be where he is today. He was adventurous and choose the road that had been traveled the least recently and that one decision changed his life
• He will be telling the story about his choice with a “sigh”. This suggests a more reflective stance on his choice and the effect it will have on his life.
• “Ages and ages hence” when he tells the story of his choice he will wonder about his life if he had taken the other road
Analysis of poem
• In ‘The Road Not Taken’ Frost has used the journey to offer ideas about how effective decisions are made. He also explores how our choices in life move us through life so that returning to previous times and situations becomes unlikely if not impossible
• On the surface the poem seems to be a meditation on past events and actions, a contemplative reflection about what has gone on before. Research into the poem informs us that the poem is written with a sense of irony
• The ambiguity which dominates the poem seems to be intentional. The only certainty in the poem is that it deals with a solitary traveler who has come to a fork in the road and must choose which way to go.
Robert Frost is an iconic poet. One of his most well-known poem is titled “The Road Not Taken”. This poem is about the narrator monologue about his travels and choices he faced. It opens up with the view with a fork in the road where two roads take different routes. The narrator must choose which road he will take. The narrator describes his setting vividly of the woods that he is traveling in and the choices he must make, such as “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back.” (14-15). The roads are not only literal choices, but also figurative choices. As they represent all life choices one must make in their lifetime. Frost uses multiple elements within his poem to bring the meaning of it to the reader’s attention. This poem is a metaphor for the choices people must make in their lives and how those choices impact their lives forever.
The speaker says he is “sorry I could not travel both”, meaning that he feels sorrowful about not being able to take both roads. This stanza has a much deeper meaning, more than just not being able to take a path. Although the speaker travels into a yellow wood, the paths represent a very important decision the traveler must make. This is an example of a metaphor where the traveler compares the decision to two paths in a wood. He observes the first choice, said as looking down as far as he could in line four, and tries to see where it will take him in the future. He only stops imaging the consequences of this choice when “it bent in the undergrowth;”(5), or when the future of the choice was no longer
The narrator chose to take one road and will claim in his later years that the one he took was the one less traveled by because he had never traveled it until then and it sets up a story to tell everyone if he says he took the road less traveled by.
At the end of the poem, the regret hangs over the travelers’ head. He realizes that at the end of his life, “somewhere ages and ages hence” (line 17), He will have regrets about having never gone back and traveling down the road he did not take. Yet he remains proud of his decision, and he recognizes that it was this path that he chose that made him turn out the way he did. “I took the road less traveled by and that has made all the difference” (line 19-20). To this man, what really made the difference is that he did what he wanted, even if it meant taking the road less traveled.
After dissecting the one road, the speaker takes the other path without putting as much time investigating it. He makes so...
The choices made on an adventure make the journey more important than the destination. In “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, a traveler in the poem is faced with two paths which represent two different decisions. The traveler struggles with these two choices, wishing he could just pick both, and if he didn’t like one he could just go back and take the different path. However, when he finally comes to a decision, it makes a huge impact. The speaker realizes this, saying, ”I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference” (Frost 20). When he made his choice and picked the one most people wouldn’t make, it changed his life, which makes the journey more important than the destination. The choice he made actually changed the destination ,which means it is more important because it affected the overall outcome.
...us hate through the symbols of fire and ice. The narrator chooses fire over ice because it’s the most relatable for them and is, in his or her mind, preferable to the hate and coldness of ice. The narrator in “The Road Not Taken” also makes a decision based on how the choices presented relate to them. They chose to be an individual and not to shape their life around someone else’s decision. “Fire and Ice” is, at a deeper level, also very different from “The Road Not Taken” because it presents two specific choices that both lead to the same end while “The Road Not Taken” opens up the possibility for endless paths and decisions with an unknown result. Regardless of where the poems guide the narrator, Frost makes it clear that our decisions affect who we are, but also opens up speculation about what it would be like had we taken different turns. It’s impossible to know.
In the poem, a person is walking along a path in an autumn forest in the early hours of the morning, when he stumbles upon a fork in the road. The speaker wishes that he would be able to travel down both of them, but he has places to go, and he does not have enough time. One is worn out from people walking along it so much, and the other is grassy and barely worn from fewer people walking on it. Although neither of them had been traveled on that day, as the leaves were still fresh on the ground, the speaker was compelled to travel the second or grassier path. The speaker fin...
624). The title of the poem clearly emphasizes the road that was not used, rather than focusing on the road that was selected less. Which is an important distinction given that one statement accentuates the choice the traveler did not make versus the other emphasizing the selection of a less travelled path. Hence, the contradiction of the title and the end of the poem convolutes the primary point of the poem and allows readers to draw different conclusions regarding the overarching thought Frost was attempting to
leads one to dwelling over the choice of road in which they did not take. In knowing that each one may be influenced in many directions, Frost clearly implies 'And be one traveler, long I stood.'; No matter how each of us may be influenced by family or various sources, there is only 'one traveler'; that will be affected by any decision and there is quite a lengthy thought process involved. Regardless of any outside influence there is only one to be involved and truly affected, as does any choice in life.
“The Road Not Taken” examines the struggles people run into when they come to a place in their life where a life altering decisions has to be made. The man who is described in this poem is traveling when he comes upon “two roads diverged” (1). He then has to choose which path he will take to continue on his journey. After standing at the diversion for a while, he knows he has to make a final decision. One path was worn down and “bent in the undergrowth” (5), so he took the other path, which was described as “perhaps the better claim/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear” (6-7). The man of the poem begins to ponder about a time when he will be telling his story of the path he took. Although we are not sure if the man regrets his decision or is relieved, he lets us know taking the road less traveled “has made all the difference” (20).
The overarching theme throughout the entire poem is that of choices. The concept of “two roads diverged,” or a split in the road, is a metaphor representing a choice which the narrator must make. Being “sorry [he] could not travel both… [being] one traveler” illustrates that, although he wishes he could see the results of both choices, as seen in saying he “looked as far as [he] could to where it bent,” he is but one pers...
In the opening stanza, Frost describes coming to a point during a walk along a rural road that diverges into two separate, yet similar paths. The narrator finds that he ...
The main theme of the poem that Frost attempts to convey is how important the decisions that one makes can be, and how they affect one’s future. In lines 2-3, he expresses the emotions of doubt and confusion by saying, “And sorry I could not travel/ And be one traveler, long I stood”, which explains how the speaker contemplated their decision of which road to take. In the closing, line 20 of the poem further reestablishes the theme when it states, “that has made all the difference”, meaning that making the decision of which road to take for themselves is the important key for a successful future. Frost helps to express this theme by using symbolism to portray a road as one’s journey of life. Using symbolism, Frost suggests that the speaker of this poem is taking the harder of the two roads presented before them, because the road the speaker chooses, “leaves no step had trodden black” (12...
This poem is one of many written by Frost in 1916 and it is commonly used in high school writing classes. It has been written about frequently and often analyzed because of the connection people feel to the poem for the reason that everyone has to make life choices. The reading of the poem touches a wide variety of readers because each one can identify with the writers predicament of having to make a choice, with two different options, as in the poem which road to take either the well-traveled path or as he decides the less journeyed. As an outcome of this choice, the writer states, that his life was profoundly different than it would have been had he taken the other road. The other road the more traveled and seemingly the safer of the two makes the reader seem more fearless to except what the unknown has to offer thus making his own way in the world. In reading further the roads are almost the same both being beautiful and equally passable. The writer tries to explain why things happened the way they did and that is a significant moment in his life. One might pick the road that gets them to w...