The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Nature and Roads Leading to the Future

“The Road Not Taken” is a part of a series of poems written by Robert Frost. In the poem, the speaker is walking on foot and comes to a fork in the road where he has to choose between two paths that are right for him to take. As he is trying to figure out what route to take, he wishes he could take both routes. The path he chooses is supposed to be less worn out, but in actuality both roads are worn out equally. The phrase, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference," talks about the choices we make in life and then how those choices one makes may have a difference in the long run. Even though the speaker in the poem wants to take the other road like people do today, it is hard to come from a decision someone has already made his or her mind up about. Taking the route a person has already chosen makes it easier and more exciting to take the road a person has chose. The speaker states that in the near future when he is older he will talk about how the road he chose changed his life in some way. Robert Frost uses roads and nature as a symbolic feature of figurative language to help readers visualize things in the poem.

The setting takes place in the daylight of the woods. I felt that Frost set the poem in the woods because it helps reader imagine trees, leaves, and bushes. Therefore readers know that the speaker is alone without any road signs or knowledge of any direction on which road to take. The “yellow wood”(1) means that its somewhere in the fall when the leaves are changing colors. The “yellow” brings out a beautiful image of the autumn to readers. The “yellow wood” means there is a continuous decision one makes in li...

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...e no matter which one we take. Those roads we do not take end up being the ones we wonder about if we chose the right one or not.

Choices are the main theme of this poem. The speaker realizes the choice he is about to make is going to affect his future. The point of this poem is that the speaker will not know his future until it happens. Nature and roads are said to be symbols that are very important to the speaker. It helps the reader understand why he choose the path he took. The fork at the road represents the speaker’s life. The title “The Road Not Taken” means that not all choices that one comes to are going to be easy and not all are going to be the right choice, but one has to make them at some point in life. When it comes to difficult situations like this it its not always best to take the one more traveled but the one best for them, but choose wisely.