Road Not Taken Metaphors

Literary devices displayed in both poems is the use of metaphors and while also using tone to help get the message across in each poem. In Robert Frost’s “ The Road not Taken ”, he uses metaphors to display different life choices. The metaphor Frost uses is having a road split into two different roads and the traveller has to pick a side, this represents a life path that the traveller has to take, the traveller can go left or right, it’s his/her choice. In the poem the traveller chooses one of the two roads and this changes his/her life. While in Dorothy Livesay’s
“ Experience” refers bread and fruit as experiences in life. Bread is the bitter and hard to swallow to experiences,while fruit is good news and allows happiness into one’s life, you gain experience from these events in your life therefore, the poem is called “Experience”. The second literary device is tone and it is used differently in both of the poems. In Frost’s poem, the words are gentle and scenery is being described, this allows the poem itself to be positive. While in Livesay’s poem, the poem is very straightforward, the use of diction in this poem is like a slap in the face, every word is direct. The overall tone in this poem feels like regret.

Frost’s poem has 4 big stanzas which total to 19 lines long while, Livesay’s poem has two short stanzas, this shows that Frost has described more and expanded more in his poem, this allows more detail to be shown and more text to analyse. Livesay’s poem is rather short because it is very direct and there is no detail in her words, this allows for a more literal meaning to be found while also keeping the message clear. The rhyming in both poems is also substantially different. In Frost’s poem the pattern goes like ABAAB and so on until the last stanza, the pattern for the last stanza is GHGH. In Livesay’s poem, the pattern goes AABCB and the second stanza pattern