Life Choices as Represented in Robert Frost's Road Not Taken

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Life Choices as Represented in Robert Frost's Road Not Taken

Choices are never easy, facing hundreds upon thousands of them in our lifetime, man has to make decisions based upon these choices. Some decisions are clear while others are sometimes not clear and more difficult to make. The poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is a prime example of these choices in life. This poem is a first person narrative that is seen by most people as being told by Frost. The poem opens up with the narrator encountering a point in the woods that has a trail diverge into two separate paths. In the poem Frost presents the idea of man facing the difficult predilection of a moment and a lifetime. I believe this idea in the poem is embodied in the fork in the road, the decision between the two paths, and the decision to select the road not taken.

Someone's life could be metaphorically related to a walk through the woods filled with many twists and turns. Throughout this journey there are instances where choices between alternate paths have to be made and the route you choose to take is not always an easy one to determine. For most people, the fork in the road represents the speaker's encounter of having to choose between two paths knowing that this decision will affect the rest of his life. Frost presents to the reader a moment in anyone's life where a strenuous and problematic choice has to be made. The two paths represent the options that someone has to choose from. Faced with these decisions, he or she has to weigh their options carefully to make this choice.

While reading this poem I was able to visualize the speaker looking far down both paths to see what each of them would bring. Though the speaker's sight is somewhat limited, on...

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... is simply taking a stroll trough the woods because he says in line 13, "I kept the first for another day," which leads me to believe that the next time he is walking in those woods he'll take the first path. I guess that Frost did his job because this poem has caused so much controversy and debates over the years. I just can't really fathom that this path was the meaning of life in a way.

I know that my view of the piece is not the only true way to go but I also know that this is poetry and it is meant to be looked at from different angles. I wouldn't be surprised if someone took the angle of saying that Frost was drunk and couldn't find his way home. There is no real answer to what this poem is about and I'm just taking the realist approach and saying that "The Road Not Taken," is not about life's ultimate choice but rather simply about a walk in the park.

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