Analysis of the Poem the Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

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Everyone needs a sense of morals in life. These morals can be learned from family members, past experiences or even nature. Robert Frost takes imagery, emotion, symbolism, and he often uses nature in his poetry to not only paint a picture in the readers mind, but also to create a more of each work.
Robert Frost was born to an editor for a father, and a member of the Swedenborgian church. His father started as a teacher, and then became the editor of the San Francisco Evening Bulletin. Isabelle Moodie, his mother, baptized him with the Swedenborgian church. Later on in Frost’s life, he left this church. Frost was born in San Francisco (“Biography of Robert Frost”, poemhunter.com). In 1994, be published his first poem, “The Butterfly: An Elegy,” on November 8, 1894 at age 20. He published this work in the New York newspaper Frost was a unique poet in the way that he stood in between the nineteenth-century poetry, and modern poetry. James M. Cox said that, “Though his career fully spans the modern period and though it is impossible to speak of him as anything other than a modern poet, it is difficult to place him in the main tradition of modern poetry,” (“Robert Frost”, poetryfoundation.org).

One of Robert Frost’s more famous poems, “The Road Not Taken,” has a strong use of imagery in it to create a meaning. Throughout the poem, most people would take the image only painted by the words. With analyzing the diction, you can see the moral truly come to the surface. “Two woods diverged in a yellow wood, / and sorry I could not travel both/ and be one traveler, long I stood/ and looked down one as far as I could/ to where it bent into the undergrowth;” (“The Road Not Taken”, poetryfoundtaion.org) Using imagery, he begins the poem by ...

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... regret it. “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by, / and that has made all the difference.” Frost uses repetition of the first phrase to emphasize the importance of the decision of which path to take. He knew this path may have rough spots along the way and it wouldn’t be smooth, but he also knew that the reward would be greater if he fought for it. He also gained experience and that changed the person he is now today.
The main moral I got from the story was the significance of independence and originality. The narrator could have easily followed the precedent set by others on the metaphoric road, the one more traveled than the others. By choosing the less traveled path he would be a follower, instead he chose to lead his own way. He didn’t let others choose the outcome of his life; he was free of peer pressure for his decisions.

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