Analysis Of The Road Not Taken By Robert Frost

The Unknown

Choices in life can be as simple as deciding where to go out to eat or what to wear and as difficult as deciding which college to enroll in and who to marry. The most strenuous part is not knowing if you made the right decision because even the simplest choices can shape the future. There are no guarantees in life so every decision counts. Second guessing is as natural to humans as breathing, which makes the decision making process that much harder because it is more than just picking something and sticking with it, there is always the curiosity of what if? Even when faced with the most difficult decisions one must live with the choices they have made, which is very similar to what the speaker of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is forced to deal with.

The poem is set in the fall when the leaves are changing colors and beginning to cover the ground. The speaker of the poem is faced with an unfamiliar fork in the road and is forced to decide which direction he or she must go. As the speaker is deliberating, he is “sorry” he cannot just travel both and it appears to be because the speaker has a fear of picking the wrong one (Frost 2). Although he “looked down one as far as I could” there was no seeing the end (4). Just like in a life, it is possible to have an idea of what will happen and there is no telling which choices will turn out beneficial and which will not. The speaker knows that although the paths are similar the outcome of picking the wrong one could be life changing. Even though he is upset he must trust in himself to know which one would be best for him in the long run.

After dissecting the one road, the speaker takes the other path without putting as much time investigating it. He makes so...

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... cope with a difficult situation by saying he will come back to it and he seems very adamant about it by the enthusiasm and explanation point at the end of the sentence.

Finally the speaker realizes that his hopes of coming back are foolish and will most likely not happen. Getting back to the path will be too difficult because “one way leads on to way” (14). The roads are all connected just like making one decision leads to making another and eventually it will be too difficult to find your way back to the beginning. It is exactly like deciding which college to attend. Once you find a school there is always that skepticism if you made the right choice or not but thinking “I can always transfer” helps cope with the decision. Once freshman year has passed the reality of transferring is a lot more complicated and it would seem impossible to start all over again.