the road not taken by robert frost essay

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The Road Not Taken Summary & Analysis by Robert Frost

• Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
• Poetic Devices
• Vocabulary & References
• Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
• Line-by-Line Explanations

Written in 1915 in England, "The Road Not Taken" is one of Robert Frost's—and the world's—most well-known poems. Although commonly interpreted as a celebration of rugged individualism, the poem actually contains multiple different meanings. The speaker in the poem, faced with a choice between two roads, takes the road "less traveled," a decision which he or she supposes "made all the difference." However, Frost creates enough subtle ambiguity in the poem that it's unclear whether the speaker's judgment should be taken at face value, and therefore, whether the poem is about the speaker making a simple but impactful choice, or about how the speaker interprets a choice whose impact is unclear.

• Read the full text of “The Road Not Taken”

The Full Text of “The Road Not Taken”

1 Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

2 And sorry I could not travel both

3 And be one traveler, long I stood

4 And looked down one as far as I could

5 To where it bent in the undergrowth;

6 Then took the other, as just as fair,

7 And having perhaps the better claim,

8 Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

9 Though as for that the passing there

10 Had worn them really about the same,

11 And both that morning equally lay

12 In leaves no step had trodden black.

13 Oh, I kept the first for another day!

14 Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

15 I doubted if I should ever come back.

16 I shall be telling this with a sigh

17 Somewhere ages and ages hence:

18 Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

19 I took the one less traveled by,

20 And that has made all the difference.

“The Road Not Taken” Summary

“the road not taken” themes.

Choices and Uncertainty

• See where this theme is active in the poem.

Individualism and Nonconformity

Making Meaning

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “the road not taken”.

Two roads 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 in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.

Lines 13-15

Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

Lines 16-17

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Lines 18-20

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

“The Road Not Taken” Symbols

Diverging Roads

• See where this symbol appears in the poem.

The Road Less Traveled

“the road not taken” poetic devices & figurative language, extended metaphor.

• See where this poetic device appears in the poem.

“The Road Not Taken” Vocabulary

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

• Yellow wood
• Undergrowth
• See where this vocabulary word appears in the poem.

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Road Not Taken”

Rhyme scheme, “the road not taken” speaker, “the road not taken” setting, literary and historical context of “the road not taken”, more “the road not taken” resources, external resources.

"The Most Misread Poem in America" — An insightful article in the Paris Review, which goes into depth about some of the different ways of reading (or misreading) "The Road Not Taken."

Robert Frost reads "The Road Not Taken" — Listen to Robert Frost read the poem.

Book Review: "The Road Not Taken," by David Orr — Those looking for an even more in-depth treatment of the poem might be interested in David Orr's book, "The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong."

LitCharts on Other Poems by Robert Frost

Acquainted with the Night

After Apple-Picking

A Roadside Stand

Desert Places

Dust of Snow

Fire and Ice

Home Burial

Mending Wall

My November Guest

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

The Death of the Hired Man

The Oven Bird

The Sound of the Trees

The Tuft of Flowers

The Wood-Pile

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The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ explores life’s choices, opportunities, and the ensuing lingering regret of untaken paths.

Robert Frost

Nationality: American

His highly accessible work made him famous in his lifetime.

Key Poem Information

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Central Message: Regret lingers as we take on life's choices, shaping our journey amidst uncertainty

Themes: Desire , Disappointment , Journey

Speaker: Unknown

Emotions Evoked: Anxiety , Confusion , Pain , Regret , Stress , Worry

Poetic Form: Quintain

Time Period: 20th Century

Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken' captivates readers with its exploration of choice and regret as it continues to resonate deeply with readers while proving its lasting appeal by tapping into the timeless and universal human condition.

‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost ( Bio | Poems ) is quite a popular poem; unfortunately, however, its popularity comes mainly from the simple act of misreading. With this poem, Frost has given the world a piece of writing that every individual can relate to, especially when it comes to the concept of choices and opportunities in life.

A majority of the time, this poem is quoted and used with an interpretation that is not exactly “correct”. The popular belief is that Frost meant for this poem to be about hope, success, and defying the odds by choosing a path well, “less traveled by.” On the other hand, if the poem is reviewed, it is quite obvious that it has fairly the opposite connotation .

It is Robert Frost’s first poem in his book “Mountain Interval” (1916). A popular, pleasantly misconstrued poem since its release, its simplicity and way with words demonstrate the skill of Frost’s pen.

Consider the following points when reading the poem

• Poet's  context :  Frost's close friendship with British writer Edward Thomas influenced the poem's creation. During Frost's time in England from 1912 to 1915, he and Thomas often took walks together, and the poem's inspiration came from an anecdote during one of these walks when Thomas was indecisive about which road to take. When Frost sent this poem to Thomas in a letter in 1915, he took it personally and enlisted himself in WWI; he was killed two years later in the war. It is significant to note the poem's origins and connection with such a tragic incident.
• Changes in Republished Version:  Frost's revisions in ' The Road Not Taken ' between its 1915 publication and its 1916 version in  Mountain Interval  reflect subtle shifts in language. The 1916 version, commonly used today, replaced "marked" with "kept" and swapped a comma in line eighteen for a dash. Frost often emphasized that this poem is tricky. Try to understand the significance of these alterations, interpreting how changes likely deepen the poem's complexity, suggesting nuanced shifts in meaning.
• Speaker 's perspective :   The poem's speaker embodies the turmoil of regret, often lamenting rejected choices. Interpreting their psychological state can yield diverse interpretations. Frost's speaker's struggles invite readers to reflect on their own experiences; relating the poem to one's own experiences can foster a deeper understanding of the poem's concerns and popularity.
• Exploring Parallels and Intertextuality :   Frost's poem's popularity prompts curiosity about its potential influence on Harry Turtledove's short story , ' The Road Not Taken ,' published in 1985. A comparative analysis between the two could analyze if the poem's exploration of choice, consequence, and fate influences the story's themes. Researching whether Turtledove read Frost's poem or borrowed the title can shed light on the potential intertextuality.

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Explore The Road Not Taken

• 3 Detailed Analysis
• 4 Structure
• 5 Literary Devices
• 6 Tone and Mood
• 7 Symbolism
• 9 Historical Context
• 11 Similar Poetry

‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost ( Bio | Poems ) describes how the speaker struggles to choose between two roads diverging in the yellowish woods on an autumn morning.

In the poem, the individual arrives at a critical juncture in his life, arriving at crossroads at last near “a yellow wood.” As per him, the paths are equally well-traversed and yield anonymous outcomes. The individual comforts with a thought about returning, be if his path is unsuitable for him, yet in hindsight, he’s aware of the futility of such thought. Since his current path will bring upon separate paths in itself, disallowing any consequent reversal. The individual concludes on a melancholic note of how different circumstances and outcomes would have been, had it been the “other” path.

The Poem Analysis Take

Expert Insights by Jyoti Chopra

B.A. (Honors) and M.A. in English Literature

Despite acknowledging the two paths' equality or interchangeability, the speaker anticipates future retellings where they claim to have taken the less traveled path. The discrepancy between the speaker's initial observation and their anticipated future narrative underscores the human tendency to reinterpret past events to align with one's desired narrative, hinting at the psychological phenomenon of memory distortion wherein memories undergo reconstruction during recall, often to fit desired identities and self-perceptions of who individuals are. Frost's speaker's projection of a future narrative exemplifies this phenomenon, revealing the intricate interplay between memory, identity, imagination, and narrative construction in shaping one's perception of reality, developing a dynamic of subjective and objective reality. The poem shows that our choices might shape our lives, but our perception of those choices shapes our reality regardless of objective truth. Most importantly, the speaker prognosticates his future recollection of the event, acknowledging the forthcoming retelling of this moment. This self-awareness, juxtaposed with recognizing the identical nature of the two diverging paths, further accentuates the intricate workings of memory distortion while hinting at the power of fate or predetermined paths, echoing determinism philosophy and the dilemma of choice and freedom, raising questions about the extent to which humans truly possess agency.

Robert Frost’s poetic masterpiece is arguably the most infamously misunderstood poem as of yet. Marrying elements of form and content, arresting artistic phraseology and metaphors , the poem is mostly read without being understood. The archetypal conundrum is the primary attraction of the poem, readers instantly relate to their personal experiences.

Forks and woods are used as metaphorical devices relating to decisions and crises. Similar forks are representative of everlasting struggle against fate and free will. Since humans are free to select as per their will, their fate is unknown to them.

‘The Road Not Taken’ actually steers clear of advising on selecting a definitive path. Frost’s take on this is slightly complicated. The grassy roads and yellow woods represent the present as the individual views from a future perspective. This self-realization is pathetic and ironic in itself. The future self will regret first his decision about taking the road less traveled on. In hindsight, his regret is everlasting in this case point.

Detailed Analysis

Two roads 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 in the undergrowth;

‘A Road Not Taken’ opens with strong imagery , because of the diction used to depict two physical roads separating from each other in “a yellow wood.” It is observably a forest that is showcasing the colors of autumn.

Line two is hasty to display the theme of regret, by revealing that the individual is “sorry” before he even decides which road to take. We basically find ourselves observing a very important moment, where he has to make a decision that is evidently difficult for him.

Lines three through five, express that the individual is trying to see as far as he can down each road, to help him decide which one he should choose to take.

Let’s thoroughly analyze the lines and their meaning below.

Lines 1–2

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both

The first two lines of this stanza introduce the dilemma that every human faces, not once, but multiple times in his or her life; the dilemma of choice. We as people go through many circumstances and experiences in our lives, and one of them is choosing between two (or more) paths.

This is experienced literally: in the roads we take and the routes we walk daily, and figuratively: when we come to points in our lives where we must make decisions for our next steps, based on the opportunities presented to us. And like the character in ‘The Road Not Taken,’ oftentimes, we are disappointed that we cannot hold on to, and experience the consequences of every opportunity that is presented to us. In order to gain some things in life, we must let others go.

Lines 3–5

And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it bent in the undergrowth;

By having the character in the poem examine the roads ahead of him, Frost is emphasizing that we all try our best to guess what lays ahead for us in every opportunity that we are presented in an attempt to find some control and later comfort over our final decisions. We like to take our time in order to make informed decisions so we can justify our choices when the regret of missing out on the other “roads” starts to haunt us.

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

In this second stanza, lines six through eight: the individual in ‘The Road Not Taken’ finally makes a decision and chooses a road that he thinks and believes is better, because it looked like not many people had walked on it before.

However, in lines nine and ten, he is quick to add that the other road looked equally used in comparison to the one he chose, so it really was not as less traveled as he was telling himself.

Lines 6–7

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim,

These lines are important because they clarify the common misunderstanding that one road was less traveled than the other since the character clearly states that both roads were “really about the same.” The diction in this stanza portrays the uncertainty of the character as he tries to justify to himself that his decision is the right one for him; and much like anyone else, he is trying to realistically weigh the outcomes of both roads.

Lines 8–10

Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

The important idea to note in these lines is that the character claimed the road he chose was better because it “wanted wear” meaning that it was tempting him. He felt that the road he chose “wanted” to be walked on by him. This underlines the nature of people in general, that we will always choose the path which seems attractive and is of interest to us, even if both paths have the equal potential of getting us to wherever it is we are headed.

That said the word “want” has historically been used to represent a lack of something. For example “the house was in want of repair” so perhaps the suggestion here is that the path is overgrown because it is less travelled.

Either way no matter where we end up, and how informed, tempting, and satisfying our choices are, we will always wonder about the “what ifs” and the “could have beens” of the other opportunities that we left behind.

Stanza Three

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

In the third stanza, Robert Frost ( Bio | Poems ) mentions in lines eleven and twelve that at the moment that this individual was making his decision, both paths were nearly identical. No one had stepped through to disturb the leaves on both roads.

Line thirteen is an important point in ‘The Road Not Taken’ as this is when the individual finalizes his decision of leaving the other road, for perhaps another time.

Lines fourteen and fifteen give us a glimpse of his doubts. He honestly confesses to himself that it’s highly unlikely he will come back to travel this other road because he knows as he moves forward he will continue to find other paths taking him further and further away from this point, where he is standing at the moment.

Lines 11–12

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.

The lines show us that this character is truly being honest with himself, as he makes the crucial decision of which road to take. His honesty is a reality check as well as a means of making a final decision. He notices that both choices lay equally in front of him and none of these choices have been “trodden black”.

Sometimes in life, when we reach a fork, we are able to make quick decisions based on what we learned from other people’s experiences. These experiences then leave marks in the choices that we have, these marks then form our bias towards or against that path. When we encounter choices in our lives where we find that the leaves are not “trodden black” by what we learned from the people around us, it becomes harder to decide between them, just like the situation of the character in ‘The Road Not Taken’ .

Lines 13–15

Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

After making his decision, he exclaims that he will leave the first choice for another day. Then he honestly tells himself that if he lets this road go now, there is no coming back. There are many defining decisions in our life that shape our future and sometimes when we select an option in these moments, they change the course of our life and there’s no turning back. That is where the regret of not exploring our other options disturbs us.

Stanza Four

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

In this last stanza, lines sixteen and seventeen, the individual predicts that one day far into the future, he knows will tell the story of this decision that he is now making.

Lines eighteen and nineteen expose that he intends to lie and claim he took the less-traveled road. In reality, both were equally traveled.

Finally, the last line expresses that the individual is also planning to claim that his choice to take this less traveled road made all the difference, in where he will be standing at the time.

Lines 16–17

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence:

These lines of the last stanza highlight the nature of our regrets. When it comes to tough decisions in our lives, we always know that no matter what we finally choose, eventually, we will regret not being able to try the possibility that was left uncharted by us.

In this stanza, the character is already imagining the regret he will feel and decides that he will not be honest when he retells the story of his decision, as it will not validate his selection of the road if he showcases his regret by stating that an equal opportunity could have landed him elsewhere in life.

Lines 18–20

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

He decides he will tell people he chose the road that was “less traveled by” to come across as a person who took a chance and succeeded in life. In reality, the character is trying to convince himself that when he shares his life experiences and distorts the truth, it will seem that taking this road “made all the difference”.

This teaches readers that they never know where life will take them, so preplanning what the end of the road looks like for themselves, and building regret is silly especially if they haven’t even started the journey in the first place. Life is about the paths you do choose to walk through, not about “the road not taken.”

Robert Frost ( Bio | Poems ) has used an interesting style in ‘The Road Not Taken’ . He works within the form, but at times, the form works within his style. Using variation and his brand of words, Robert Frost’s poems followed a unique composition. At times, he created forms to suit his poetry.

He has a general tendency to work within and without boundaries, carving memorable, identifiable, and idiosyncratic poetry. In his early years, he perfected the art of “sound of sense”, bringing raw sensory perception to a human mind. The sound of words forms imagery due to the form of words and sound of sense.

Robert Frost ( Bio | Poems ) has penned the poem in the first-person point of view . So, it’s a lyric poem . It comprises five verses encapsulated in four stanzas . So, there are a total of 20 lines in the text. Let’s have a look at the rhyme scheme and meter of this piece.

Rhyme Scheme

This poem follows a set rhyme scheme. In each quintain , the rhyming convention employed is ABAAB. It means that there are two sets of rhymes . The sound with which the first line ends occurs again in the third and fourth lines. While the second and last lines rhyme together.

For example, let’s have a look at the rhyme scheme of the first stanza.

Two roads 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 in the undergrowth ;

In the first line, “wood” rhymes with the words, “stood” and “could” present in the third and fourth lines. The second line ends with “both”. For rhyming, the poet chooses the word “undergrowth” in the last line. The same scheme is followed throughout the poem. There are no such exceptions.

Each line of this piece consists of nine syllables. Some lines contain a syllable more or less than the average syllable count. While reading the text, the stress generally falls on the second syllable of each foot. So, the overall poem is composed of iambic tetrameter . It means there are a total of four iambs in every line. However, there are a few metrical variations as well.

Let’s take the first stanza and scan it metrically.

Two roads / di- verged / in a yel -/low wood , And sor -/ry I / could not tra -/vel both And be / one tra -/ve-ler, long / I stood And looked / down one / as far / as I could To where / it bent / in the un -/der- growth ;

From the scansion of the first stanza, it is clear that Frost also uses a few anapests here and there throughout the poem. There are a total of four feet in each line. As the majority of the feet are composed of iambs, the dominant meter of this piece is the iambic tetrameter.

Literary Devices

Frost uses several literary devices in ‘The Road Not Taken’ . To begin with, he uses anaphora in the second, third, and fourth lines of the first stanza. Another important device of this piece is enjambment . It can be seen in the third and fourth lines. Using this device, he maintains the flow in between the lines as well as connects them internally.

Readers can find the use of metonymy in the phrase, “a yellow wood”. It refers to the season, autumn, and its effect on nature. There is a symbol in the usage of the word, “undergrowth”. It stands for the undiscovered regions of the future.

In the second stanza, readers can find the use of irony in this line, “And having perhaps the better claim.” This device is explained further below. Apart from that, Frost uses alliteration in the phrase, “wanted wear”.

The third stanza presents an inversion or hyperbaton in this line, “In leaves no step had trodden black.” The line also contains a synecdoche . In the following line, readers can find a rhetorical exclamation. 

In the last stanza, the poet uses repetition for emphasizing a particular idea. For example, the phrase, “ages and ages” emphasizes the continuity of life’s journey. While the repetition of the word, “I” in the end and beginning of the third and fourth lines are meant for the sake of highlighting the speaker’s hesitation. Such repetition is also known as anadiplosis . Lastly, the poem ends with a paradox .

Frost uses several metaphors in this poem to bring home his innovative ideas. For example, the title of the poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’ contains a metaphor . In it, the “road” is a metaphor for the choice we make.

Moving on to the text, there is another metaphor in the “yellow wood”. In this phrase, the poet implicitly compares the idea of change to the yellowish wood. He compares the speaker of this piece to a traveler who is struck while choosing the best option to carry on his journey.

Likewise, readers can find another metaphor in the last stanza. Here, the road “less traveled by” is a metaphor for the choices less preferred by humans. It refers to unconventional things that pragmatic society doesn’t follow at all. However, some people choose such unconventional options. So, in the speaker’s case, he has not opted for the rarest choice.

The ironic undertone is inexorable. As he writes,

The individual anticipates insincerity in his future, looking in retrospect later on. He’s aware that he will be far from correct and even hypocritical at times, looking at his life.

Furthermore, he is fully aware that his future self will ultimately deny his past self’s decision, asserting it strongly. In essence, there’s no definitive true path here. As a result, what lies on the other path may trouble an individual with remnant feelings of guilt afterward.

With ironic undertones throughout, the poem contains hints of remorse due to choosing a path without much knowledge about either. Along the way, the individual wonders about the other path and what’s irrevocably lost in deselecting it.

The use of imagery, in this piece, makes it an interesting read. It helps readers to imagine the plot of this poem. There is no unnecessary information in the text. Frost begins directly with the primary image of the poem that is of the “two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” By using this visual imagery filled with the color of autumn, the poet depicts the place where his speaker is struggling to make a decision.

He further describes that the roads bent in the undergrowth. It means that the speaker cannot see what is there ahead of the road. In this way, Frost paints a beautiful picture of two long roads going in two different directions in the woods.

Readers can find more secondary details, integral to the main image, in the following stanzas. According to the speaker, the roads more or less look the same. Grasses cover them and one of them is less traveled than the other. Besides, some pale leaves are lying on the road. On one road, he can see trodden, black leaves. While he cannot see such leaves on the other road.

Providing this description, Frost tries to depict two ideas through these images. The first idea is of the choice that one can make easily by learning from the experience of others. Secondly, the image of the less trodden road depicts a way that can be less traveled, but it is less discovered by others.

Tone and Mood

To understand the tone and mood of this poem, readers have to look for the words that have emotions associated with them. One such word appears at the very beginning of the second line. The speaker says, “sorry” for not being able to travel on both roads. How does this particular word influence the poem’s tone and mood?

First of all, it tells readers that the speaker is not confident enough to make a decision. Therefore he feels sorry for himself. It reflects his mental state as well as the poem’s mood that is a little bit drifting towards the lethargic state of mind. Besides, the tone is emotive but not direct as it lacks confidence.

Another phrase, “long I stood” prolongs the mood of indecisiveness and confusion. The tone follows the mood and it changes into an introspective one.

In the following stanza, the word “perhaps” in the second line depicts the tone of dilemma. The confused mood of the speaker also confuses the readers. Moving on to the following stanzas, the individual becomes comparably confident yet his tone reflects a sense of grief as he thinks the other road might be better than the one he is about to walk on.

The infamous poem is rich with simplistic literal symbolism . Frost sets up a fictional stage for an individual upon which he sets the direction of his life with irreparable consequences. It’s a metaphor for people juggling with lifelong decisions. Seemingly an obvious poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’ has been subjective, catering to multiple interpretations. According to Robert Frost ( Bio | Poems ) himself:

You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem—very tricky.

In this piece, readers have to be aware of the use of symbols . The first dilemma that comes across while reading the text is about the actual symbolic significance of the two roads. These roads do not refer to two different paths. Rather Frost points at two superficially identical roads symbolizing the choices a person has to make. He can only choose any one of them as it is literally impossible to be “one traveler” on both roads. Besides, readers can find another symbol in “a yellow wood”. It refers to the idea of change.

The thematic idea of ‘The Road Not Taken’ intrinsically lies in “ carpe diem ”, judging by its nuance. In conventional carpe diem poems, readers can find that the speaker is urging one to seize the moment and live in the present. Likewise, in this poem, the poet presents a person who is not sure about what to do. He thinks about the future so he cannot make a decision based on the present scenario.

This piece also taps on several other themes such as choice, uncertainty, indecision, fate, and over-thinking. The main theme of this piece is choice and uncertainty. In this poem, the speaker has to make a choice and he is uncertain about the best one. He thinks what he will choose cannot be suitable for him.

The next theme that can be found is indecision. Readers can find this theme in the lines such as, “Then look at the other, as just as fair,/ And having perhaps the better claim.” Right after these lines, the speaker says both of them are “really about the same.” That’s why he struggles with indecision.

It also seems that the speaker is a fatalist. He relies on it more than the present moment. This mindset creates more confusion in his life. Last but not least is overthinking. This theme is present throughout this piece. Here, the narrator has to make a simple decision. But, he thinks more than what is necessary. It leads to all the confusion not only in his case but also in the case of readers.

Historical Context

Robert Frost ‘s ‘The Road Not Taken’ depicts the poet or individual looking in retrospect and contemplating upon past decisions. As per a biographical account by Lawrence Thompson, “Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph”, the poem was based on his Welsh pal named Edward Thomas. According to him, his friend was always regretful of his decision, irrespective of the road taken.

Considering himself as a regional poet, New England has been used as a recurring location in Robert Frost’s poems . He moved to New Hampshire in his early teens. As a result, the rich culture, vivid imagery, history, and landscape are reflected in his published work. Elements such as orchards, forests, fields, and small towns are observed commonly. His narrators are often close to nature, wandering in woods (Read ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ ), in snowstorms, and picking apples (Refer to ‘After Apple-Picking’ ).

It is a narrative poem as it tells a story of a speaker who was struggling to choose on a morning. This poem also describes the mindset of the central character in metered verse . Besides, it is told from the first-person point of view . So, it’s a lyric with a set rhyming and metrical scheme.

From 1912 to 1915, Robert Frost lived in England. There he developed a friendship with the poet Edward Thomas. Often they went out for walks. One day, as they were walking they came across two roads diverging in different directions. Thomas was indecisive about which way to take. In 1915, when Frost returned to New Hampshire, he wrote the verses of ‘The Road Not Taken’ recounting this event. He sent the copy to Thomas and it compelled him to get rid of his indecisiveness concerning other things of his life.

The poem was first published in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic Monthly. It was later published in Frost’s poetry collection ‘Mountain Interval’ (1916) as its first poem.

The poem is titled, ‘The Road Not Taken,’ for an interesting reason. In the poem, the road that is not taken by the speaker is the one that is interestingly similar to the other road he takes. The poet mentions the first road in the title to emphasize the dominant thought of the speaker ’s mind. If there is only one road, there won’t be any problem. As there are two options, he struggles to make a decision and suffers through prolonged indecisiveness. Even if he takes a path (that may be suitable for him), he will still be thinking of the other one. We often think in this pattern. So, the poet advises us not to be engrossed in such thoughts.

The phrase “a yellow wood” symbolizes the abstract idea of change. It is also a symbol of the season, Autumn. The roads diverged in the woods. So, it means that no matter what road the speaker takes, there will be a change in his life. It is up to him how he reacts to it.

‘The Road Not Taken’ is about regret. In a superficial reading, it may seem that the poet is appreciating the speaker ’s decision. However, analyzing the text thoroughly will reveal that the speaker regrets the choice he makes even before its actual implementation.

The poetic persona doubts if he should ever come back or not. If he takes a road, he has to follow wherever it takes him. There will be ways that will lead him to other ways. In the process, he won’t have enough time to return at this juncture and choose ‘the road not taken.’

Robert Frost’s speaker chose the road less traveled as he had to make a decision. Otherwise, he would get stuck at that place forever. So, for the sake of continuing the journey of life, he took the other road, less traveled. He might do better that way, or it could prove futile. No matter what happened to him, he had to make a decision.

Similar Poetry

Here is a list of a few poems that similarly showcase the themes present in Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road Not Taken.’

• ‘Song of the Open Road ‘ by Walt Whitman ( Bio | Poems ) – It’s one of the best-known poems of Walt Whitman . This poem describes a trip the speaker takes to learn about himself and enjoy the journey to an unknown destination.
• ‘ There is Pleasure in the Pathless Woods’ by Lord Byron ( Bio | Poems ) – It’s one of the best-loved poems of Byron . This poem reflects a speaker’s strong desire for solitude and peace.
• ‘The Road Goes Ever On’ by J.R.R. Tolkien ( Bio | Poems ) – It’s among the popular poems of J.R.R. Tolkien . This poem explores the themes of possibilities in life and hope.
• ‘ The Way Through the Woods’ by Rudyard Kipling ( Bio | Poems ) – It’s one of the best Rudyard Kipling poems . This poem describes the changes that have come over one particular plot of forest.

You can also read about these raw anxiety poems and the best English language poems ever .

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I noticed another aspect that the author has specifically chosen yellow paths, not red as one would see in maple trees in autumn. It suggests that these trees may be alder or birch trees which are considered pioneer species. Perhaps it was meant to signify that the woods themselves were new as “No man can step into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and it is not the same man.” Maybe he wanted to show that every choice and experience is entirely unique and there is no road less travelled by for all of them lie untrodden waiting and growing patiently for us to cross them and then be converted to ashes.

HEY, i dont get the structure part, kinda just waffled that part ngl

wait, you waffled or we did?

i dont understand the paragraph about structure

It’s basically just saying that Frost could often be subversive. That he used common forms but then altered them…often for effect.

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Asad, Omer. "The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/robert-frost/the-road-not-taken/ . Accessed 6 September 2024.

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Poems & Poets

Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken”

Our choices are made clear in hindsight..

BY Katherine Robinson

Robert Frost wrote “ The Road Not Taken ” as a joke for a friend, the poet Edward Thomas . When they went walking together, Thomas was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and—in retrospect—often lamented that they should, in fact, have taken the other one. Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been “taken pretty seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling. … Mea culpa.” However, Frost liked to quip, “I’m never more serious than when joking.” As his joke unfolds, Frost creates a multiplicity of meanings, never quite allowing one to supplant the other—even as “The Road Not Taken” describes how choice is inevitable. 

“The Road Not Taken” begins with a dilemma, as many fairytales do. Out walking, the speaker comes to a fork in the road and has to decide which path to follow:

Two roads 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 in the undergrowth … 

In his description of the trees, Frost uses one detail—the yellow leaves—and makes it emblematic of the entire forest. Defining the wood with one feature prefigures one of the essential ideas of the poem: the insistence that a single decision can transform a life. The yellow leaves suggest that the poem is set in autumn, perhaps in a section of woods filled mostly with alder or birch trees. The leaves of both turn bright yellow in fall, distinguishing them from maple leaves, which flare red and orange. Both birches and alders are “pioneer species,” the first trees to come back after the land has been stripped bare by logging or forest fires. An inveterate New England farmer and woodsman, Robert Frost would have known these woods were “new”—full of trees that had grown after older ones had been decimated. One forest has replaced another, just as—in the poem—one choice will supplant another. The yellow leaves also evoke a sense of transience; one season will soon give way to another. 

The speaker briefly imagines staving off choice, wishing he could “travel both / And be one traveler.” (A fastidious editor might flag the repetition of travel / traveler here, but it underscores the fantasy of unity—traveling two paths at once without dividing or changing the self.) The syntax of the first stanza also mirrors this desire for simultaneity: three of the five lines begin with the word and . 

After peering down one road as far as he can see, the speaker chooses to take the other one, which he describes as 

                                      … just as fair,  And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that, the passing there Had worn them really about the same. 

Later in the poem, the speaker calls the road he chose “less traveled,” and it does initially strike him as slightly grassier, slightly less trafficked. As soon as he makes this claim, however, he doubles back, erasing the distinction even as he makes it: “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” 

Frost then reiterates that the two roads are comparable, observing—this time—that the roads are equally untraveled , carpeted in newly fallen yellow leaves: 

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. 

The poem masquerades as a meditation about choice, but the critic William Pritchard suggests that the speaker is admitting that “choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had ‘perhaps the better claim.’” In many ways, the poem becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic actions. 

Having made his choice, the speaker declares, “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” The diction up until now has been matter-of-fact, focusing on straightforward descriptions and avoiding figurative language. This line initiates a change: as the speaker shifts from depiction to contemplation, the language becomes more stilted, dramatic, and old-fashioned. This tonal shift subtly illustrates the idea that the concept of choice is, itself, a kind of artifice. 

Thus far, the entire poem has been one sentence. The meandering syntax of this long sentence—which sprawls across stanzas, doubling back on itself, revising its meaning, and delaying the finality of decisiveness—mirrors the speaker’s thought process as he deliberates. The neatness of how the sentence structure suddenly converges with the line structure (this sentence is exactly one line) echoes the sudden, clean division that choice creates. 

As the tone becomes increasingly dramatic, it also turns playful and whimsical. “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” sounds like something sighed in a parlor drama, comic partly because it is more dramatic than the occasion merits: after all, the choice at hand is not terribly important. Whichever road he chooses, the speaker, will, presumably, enjoy a walk filled with pleasant fall foliage. 

The poem’s tone also turns increasingly eerie, elusive, and difficult to grasp. As he does throughout the poem, the speaker makes a confident statement (“I saved the first for another day!”) only to turn back and revise it: 

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,  I doubted if I should ever come back. 

Already, the speaker doubts he’ll ever return. Writing, as he was, for his friend Edward Thomas, Frost was perhaps thinking of one of Thomas’s most famous poems, “ Roads .” Thomas, who was Welsh, lived in a country where roads built by the Romans two millennia previously were (and are) still in use. Some, now paved over, are used as highways, remnants of a culture that has long since vanished and been supplanted by another. In “Roads,” Thomas writes,    

Roads go on  While we forget, and are  Forgotten like a star That shoots and is gone. 

Later he imagines roads when people are absent: 

They are lonely  While we sleep, lonelier  For lack of the traveller   Who is now a dream only. 

“The Road Not Taken” appears as a preface to Frost’s Mountain Interval , which was published in 1916 when Europe was engulfed in World War I; the United States would enter the war a year later. Thomas’s “Roads” evokes the legions of men who will return to the roads they left only as imagined ghosts: 

Now all roads lead to France And heavy is the tread Of the living; but the dead  Returning lightly dance. 

Frost wrote this poem at a time when many men doubted they would ever go back to what they had left. Indeed, shortly after receiving this poem in a letter, Edward Thomas's Army regiment was sent to Arras, France, where he was killed two months later. 

When Frost sent the poem to Thomas, Thomas initially failed to realize that the poem was (mockingly) about him. Instead, he believed it was a serious reflection on the need for decisive action. (He would not be alone in that assessment.) 

Frost was disappointed that the joke fell flat and wrote back, insisting that the sigh at the end of the poem was “a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of the thing.” The joke rankled; Thomas was hurt by this characterization of what he saw as a personal weakness—his indecisiveness, which partly sprang from his paralyzing depression. Thomas presciently warned Frost that most readers would not understand the poem’s playfulness and wrote, “I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them & advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on.” Edward Thomas was right, and the critic David Orr has hailed “The Road Not Taken” as a poem that “at least in its first few decades … came close to being reader-proof.” 

The last stanza—stripped of the poem’s earlier insistence that the roads are “really about the same”—has been hailed as a clarion call to venture off the beaten path and blaze a new trail. Frost’s lines have often been read as a celebration of individualism, an illustration of Emerson’s claim that “Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.” In the film Dead Poets Society , the iconoclastic teacher Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, takes his students into a courtyard, instructs them to stroll around, and then observes how their individual gaits quickly subside into conformity. He passionately tells them, “Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—/ I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’” 

Far from being an ode to the glories of individualism, however, the last stanza is a riddling, ironic meditation on how we turn bewilderment and impulsiveness into a narrative: 

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. 

Again, the language is stylized, archaic, and reminiscent of fairytales. Frost claims he will be telling the story “somewhere ages and ages hence,” a reversal of the fairytale beginning, “Long, long ago in a faraway land.” Through its progression, the poem suggests that our power to shape events comes not from choices made in the material world—in an autumn stand of birches—but from the mind’s ability to mold the past into a particular story. The roads were about the same, and the speaker’s decision was based on a vague impulse. The act of assigning meanings—more than the inherent significance of events themselves—defines our experience of the past. 

The fairytale-like language also accentuates the way the poem slowly launches into a conjuring trick. Frost liked to warn listeners (and readers) that “you have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem—very tricky.” Part of its trick is that it enacts what it has previously claimed is impossible: the traveling of two roads at once. 

The poem’s ending refuses to convey a particular emotional meaning; it playfully evades categorizations even as it describes divisions created by choices. Its triumph is that it does travel two emotional trajectories while cohering as a single statement. We cannot tell, ultimately, whether the speaker is pleased with his choice; a sigh can be either contented or regretful. The speaker claims that his decision has made “all the difference,” but the word difference itself conveys no sense of whether this choice made the speaker’s life better or worse—he could, perhaps, be envisioning an alternate version of life, one full of the imagined pleasures the other road would have offered. 

Indeed, when Frost and Thomas went walking together, Thomas would often choose one fork in the road because he was convinced it would lead them to something, perhaps a patch of rare wild flowers or a particular bird’s nest. When the road failed to yield the hoped-for rarities, Thomas would rue his choice, convinced the other road would have doubtless led to something better. In a letter, Frost goaded Thomas, saying, “No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.” 

And, indeed, the title of the poem hovers over it like a ghost: “The Road Not Taken.” According to the title, this poem is about absence. It is about what the poem never mentions: the choice the speaker did not make, which still haunts him. Again, however, Frost refuses to allow the title to have a single meaning: “The Road Not Taken” also evokes “the road less traveled,” the road most people did not take. 

The poem moves from a fantasy of staving off choice to a statement of division. The reader cannot discern whether the “difference” evoked in the last line is glorious or disappointing—or neither. What is clear is that the act of choosing creates division and thwarts dreams of simultaneity.  All the “difference” that has arisen—the loss of unity—has come from the simple fact that choice is always and inescapably inevitable. The repetition of I —as well as heightening the rhetorical drama—mirrors this idea of division. The self has been split. At the same time, the repetition of I recalls the idea of traveling two roads as one traveler: one I stands on each side of the line break—on each side of the verse’s turn—just as earlier when the speaker imagined being a single traveler walking down both roads at once. 

The poem also wryly undercuts the idea that division is inevitable: the language of the last stanza evokes two simultaneous emotional stances. The poem suggests that—through language and artifice—we can “trick” our way out of abiding by the law that all decisions create differences. We can be one linguistic traveler traveling two roads at once, experiencing two meanings. In a letter, Frost claimed, “My poems … are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless.” The meaning of this poem has certainly tripped up many readers—from Edward Thomas to the iconic English teacher in Dead Poets Society . But the poem does not trip readers simply to tease them—instead it aims to launch them into the boundless, to launch them past spurious distinctions and into a vision of unbounded simultaneity. 

Katherine Robinson earned a BA from Amherst College, an MFA from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Hudson Review, Poet Lore, The Common and elsewhere. Her critical interests include the influence of mythology and bardic poetry on contemporary poetics, especially in the work of Ted Hughes , and her essays have been published...

A Summary and Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Road Not Taken’ is one of Robert Frost’s most famous poems. It appeared in his first collection, Mountain Interval , in 1916; indeed, ‘The Road Not Taken’ opens the volume. For this reason, it’s natural and understandable that many readers take the poem to be Frost’s statement of individualism as a poet: he will take ‘the road less travelled’.

But when we analyse Frost’s poem more closely, we realise how inaccurate such a summary of the poem is. Frost himself, two years before his death, lamented the way readers and critics had misinterpreted the poem, which he called ‘tricky’.

You can read ‘The Road Not Taken’ here .

Paraphrase and summary

Rather than offer a summary of ‘The Road Not Taken’, we’ll undertake a brief paraphrase of the poem’s meaning. ‘I came to a fork in the road in the yellow wood through which I was travelling, and wished I could have travelled both paths. But obviously that wasn’t an option, so I spent a long while standing there and deliberating which to choose.

After spending a good while looking down one of the roads as far as I could see, I then took the other road, since it seemed just as nice. And it seemed to be preferable, perhaps, because it wasn’t as well-trodden as the other – its grass was less worn.

Though actually, if I’m honest, both paths were as worn as each other, suggesting that both roads were really about equal in terms of how many people had passed along them. Both of the roads were covered with leaves and there was no sign, on the morning I passed through that way, that anyone had walked either path yet that day.

I decided to come back another day and take the other path, the road I hadn’t taken. But in reality, knowing that one road tends to lead onto another, I doubted whether I would ever come back to this spot. In the future I’ll tell people, with a sigh, that two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, and that’s made all the difference.’

Not how the above paraphrase-as-summary turns into more or less word-for-word recital of Frost’s words in those final few lines of the poem. They don’t need paraphrasing: they’re plain as day. Why is it, then, that many readers apparently misinterpret ‘The Road Not Taken’? How should we analyse Frost’s poem, and how have we been getting it wrong?

The way the poem is often summarised – eliding the subtle self-commentary that the poem’s speaker provides – offers a clue to this interpretive misfire. Frost’s narrator comes to a fork in the road and, lamenting the fact that he has to choose between them, takes ‘the one less traveled by’.

Yet this isn’t true, as the poem’s speaker admits: the two paths are, in fact, equally covered with leaves – one is not ‘less traveled by’ after all, but it suits him to pretend that this was so, as a way of justifying his decision to take one road over the other.

After all, ‘two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took one of them, and there was absolutely nothing to pick between them’ wouldn’t have made all the difference, for there is no difference.

One of the best places to begin a close analysis of a poem is often with the title, and with Frost’s poem this old piece of advice is truer than with most poems. After all, the poem is titled ‘The Road Not Taken’, and not ‘The Road Less Travelled’: in other words, Frost’s poem foregrounds to us that it is the road he didn’t take – not the apparently ‘less traveled’ one that he did – which is the real subject of the poem.

The poem’s famous final lines are less a proud assertion of individualism, then, and more a bittersweet example of the way we always rewrite our own histories to justify the decisions we make. ‘I kidded myself that one of the roads was less well-trodden and so, to be different from the mainstream, that’s the one I took, brave and independent risk-taker and road-taker that I am.’

This isn’t true, but it’s the sort of self-myth-making we often go in for. It’s also significant here that in Mountain Interval , where it was first published in 1916, ‘The Road Not Taken’ appears as a sort of preface to the poems that follow: it’s typeset in italics rather than Roman type, as if it’s being offered as a test to the reader.

What is also less well-known than it should be about ‘The Road Not Taken’ is the fact that the poem may have begun life as Frost’s gentle ribbing of his friend, the English poet Edward Thomas, with whom Frost had taken many walks during the pre-WWI years when Frost had been living in England. (Thomas was on his way to visit Frost in June 1914 when his train made an unscheduled stop at Adlestrop railway station – an event that inspired Thomas’s poem of that name.)

Frost found Thomas to be an indecisive man, and after he’d written ‘The Road Not Taken’ but before it was published, he sent it to Thomas, whose indecisiveness even extended to uncertainty over whether to follow Frost to the United States or to enlist in the army and go and fight in France.

Frost intended the poem to be a semi-serious mockery of people like Thomas, but it was taken more seriously by Thomas, and by countless readers since. Indeed, Frost’s poem may even have been what inspired Thomas to make up his mind and finally choose which ‘road’ to follow: he chose war over America, and ‘The Road Not Taken’ is, perhaps, what forced his hand.

If you found this analysis of ‘The Road Not Taken’ helpful, you can listen to Frost reading his poem here .

About Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) is regarded as one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century. And yet he didn’t belong to any particular movement: unlike his contemporaries William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens he was not a modernist, preferring more traditional modes and utilising a more direct and less obscure poetic language.

He famously observed of free verse, which was favoured by many modernist poets, that it was ‘like playing tennis with the net down’.

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8 thoughts on “A Summary and Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’”

Thank you for that. Appreciate it.

Thank you. I was looking for this one.

Sent from my iPad

Interesting, thanks for this. It is my favorite poem and poet.

• Pingback: KOMMONSENTSJANE -A Short Analysis of Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’ — Interesting Literature | kommonsentsjane

A really good analysis of a surprisingly tricky poem…

John Green does a great vlog post of the poem–uses his kayak trip as an example.

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Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken: Meaning and Analysis

General Education

Robert Frost is arguably one of the most well-known American poets of all time, so it’s not surprising that his work is taught in high schools and colleges across the nation. Because he’s so famous, chances are you’ve encountered “The Road Not Taken” before .

We’re here to help you build a deeper understanding of “The Road Not Taken.” To help you learn what Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” poem is all about, we’ll cover the following in this article:

• A brief intro to the poet, Robert Frost
• Information about the poem’s background
• “The Road Not Taken” meaning
• “The Road Not Taken” analysis, including the top two themes in the poem
• The poetic devices in “The Road Not Taken” that you need to know

There’s a lot to talk about, so let’s get going!

Robert Frost is widely recognized as one of the most influential American poets of the 20th century. (Sneha Raushan/ Wikimedia )

Robert Frost Biography

Robert Frost was born in 1874 in San Francisco, California. His father was a newspaper editor (a profession Frost later practiced himself, among others), and his mother was a teacher and Scottish immigrant. When he was about ten years old, his family moved to Massachusetts to be near his grandfather, who owned a sawmill. Frost was named both the valedictorian and the “class poet” of his high school graduating class ...and two years later published his first poem, “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” in the New York Independent magazine. 

At this point, Frost knew he wanted to be a poet. But unfortunately, the next segment of Frost’s life would be marked by upheaval . He attended both Dartmouth and Harvard, but dropped out of both before graduating. His poetry wasn’t gaining traction in the United States, either. To complicate matters further, Frost and his wife, Elinor, suffered personal tragedy when two of their six children died in infancy. 

In 1900, feeling frustrated by his job prospects and a lack of traction in his poetry career, Frost moved his family to a farm left to him by his grandfather in Derry, New Hampshire. Frost would live there for nine years, and many of his most famous early poems were written before his morning chores while tending to the farm . But Frost’s poetry was still largely overlooked by American publishers. Consequently, Frost decided to sell the farm in 1911 and moved his family to London. It was there he published his first anthology of poetry, A Boy’s Will, in 1913 . 

Frost’s second anthology, North of Boston, was published in 1914 and found massive success in England. Finally, after years of struggle, Frost became a famous poet essentially overnight. In order to avoid WWI, Frost returned to the U.S. in 1915 and began teaching at Amherst College and the University of Michigan , all the while continuing to write poetry. He received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, and became the public face of 20th century American poetry . Late in life, at 86 years old, Robert Frost also became the first inaugural poet at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1960. 

Throughout his career, Frost never strayed far from old-fashioned, pastoral poetry, despite the fact that newer American poets moved in a more experimental direction. Frost’s poetry continued to focus on rural New England life up until his death in 1963. 

Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” Poem

“The Road Not Taken” is a narrative poem , meaning it is a poem that tells a story. It was written in 1915 as a joke for Frost’s friend, Edward Thomas. Frost and Thomas were fond of hiking together, and Thomas often had trouble making up his mind which trail they should follow. (Yes, that’s right: one of the most famous American poems was originally written as a goofy private joke between two friends!)

Frost first read it to some college students who, to his surprise, thought it a very serious poem. “The Road Not Taken” was first published in the August 1915 issue of The Atlantic Monthly , and then was re-published as the opening poem in his poetry collection Mountain Interval the next year.

The full text of the poem is below.

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Two roads 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 in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Frost's most famous poem got its start as part of a letter sent to his best friend on the eve of World War I.

The Background Behind “The Road Not Taken” Poem

“The Road Not Taken” has become well known for its perceived encouragement to take the “[road] less traveled by.” In other words, many people interpret this poem as a call to blaze new trails and break away from the status quo. This is partly why lots of people misremember the poem’s title as “The Road Less Travelled.” 

This interpretation of “The Road Not Taken” is debatable (more on that later), but it was enough to inspire Frost’s friend Edward Thomas to make a very grave decision to fight in World War I.

Frost and Thomas were great friends while Frost lived in England, both of them were well-read and very interested in nature. They frequently took long walks together , observing nature in the English countryside. However, Frost’s time in England ended in 1915 when World War I was on the verge of breaking out. He returned to the United States to avoid the war and fully expected Thomas to follow him. 

Thomas did not. Frost’s poem came in the mail as Thomas was deciding whether to leave Europe or to participate in the war effort. While “The Road Not Taken” wasn’t the only thing that made Thomas enlist and fight in World War I, it was a factor in his decision. Thomas, regretting his lack of achievement compared to his good friend Frost and feeling that the poem mocked his indecisiveness, decided to take initiative and fight for his country. Unfortunately, Thomas was killed at the Battle of Arras on April 9, 1917.

Thomas was inspired to take “the road not taken” because of Frost’s poem. The same is true for many people who’ve read the poem since it was first published in 1915. The concept of taking a “road less traveled'' seems to advocate for individuality and perseverance , both of which are considered central to American culture. The poem has been republished thousands upon thousands of times and has inspired everything from self-help books to car commercials .

Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” Analysis: Meaning and Themes

To help you understand the significance of Robert Frost’s poetry, we’ll break down the overall meaning and major themes of the poem in our “The Road Not Taken” analysis below. 

But before we do, go back and reread the poem. Once you have that done, come back here...and we can get started! 

Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” Meaning

“The Road Not Taken” is a poem that argues for the importance of our choices, both big and small, since they shape our journey through life . For Frost, the most important decisions we make aren’t the ones we spend tons of time thinking about, like who we have relationships with , where we go to college , or what our future career should be . Instead, Frost’s poem posits that the small choices we make each and every day also have big impacts on our lives. Each decision we make sets us upon a path that we may not understand the importance of until much, much later. 

This theme is reflected throughout the poem. For instance, the poem begins with a speaker placing us in a scene, specifically at the point where two roads break away from each other in the middle of a “yellow wood.”

The speaker is sorry they cannot go both directions and still “be one traveler,” which is to say that they cannot live two divergent lives and still be one single person . In other words, the speaker can’t “have their cake and eat it, too.” The speaker has to choose one direction to go down, because like in life, making a decision often means that other doors are subsequently shut for you. 

For example, if you choose to go to college at UCLA, that means you’re also choosing not to go to college elsewhere. You’ll never know what it would be like to go to the University of Michigan or as a freshman straight out of high school because you made a different choice. But this is true for smaller, day-to-day decisions as well. Choosing who you spend time with, how hard you study, and what hobbies your pursue are examples of smaller choices that also shape your future, too.

The speaker of the poem understands that . They stand at the crossroads of these two paths for a long time, contemplating their choice. First, they stare down one path as far as he or she can, to where it trails off into the undergrowth. The speaker then decides to take the other path, which they state is just as “fair,” meaning just as attractive as the first. The narrator states that the second path “wanted wear,” meaning that it was slightly more overgrown than the first path.

But more importantly, no matter which path the speaker takes, they know they’re committed to follow it wherever it may lead. We see that in this stanza:

While the speaker says they “saved the first” path for “another day” to make them feel better about their decision, the next two lines show that the speaker realizes they probably won’t be able to double back and take the first path, no matter where the second one leads. Just like in life, each path leads to another path, and then another. In other words, the decisions we make in the moment add up and influence where we end up in life--and we don’t really get a “redo” on. 

After choosing their path, the speaker says they look forward to a day far in the future when, “with a sigh,” they’ll tell people about taking the road “less traveled by,/And that has made all the difference.” 

Does this mean that taking the one less traveled has “made all the difference” in a good way?

Saying so “with a sigh” doesn’t necessarily sound like a good thing. The poem isn’t at all clear on whether or not taking the less traveled path was a good choice or a bad choice . So while the poem is clear that all of our choices shape the path we take in life, it’s more ambiguous about whether choosing “less traveled” paths is a good thing or not. That’s up to readers to decide! 

Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” Theme 1: The Power of Hindsight 

This brings us to our first theme: how hindsight gives our choices power.  

The speaker begins at a point of bifurcation (which is a fancy way of saying “break into two branches”). As readers, we’re meant to take the poem both as a literal story about someone in the woods trying to decide which way to go, as well as a metaphor about how our life choices are like divergent paths in the woods. 

Like we mentioned earlier, the poem is clear that you can’t take two paths and still “be one traveler,” nor can you be certain that you’ll ever get a chance to test out your other options. That’s because every choice you make leads to more choices, all of which lead you further and further from our starting point. 

However, the poem also suggests that while the choices we make are important, how we interpret these choices is what really makes us who we are. We see this in the last lines of the poem, which read: 

I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Essentially, the speaker is saying that later in life he will look back in time and see that moment as one of great significance. But we can only know which choices matter the most through the power of retrospection. It’s like the old saying goes: hindsight is 20/20! 

Here’s what frost means: when we’re making choices in life, they might seem inconsequential or like they’re not that big of a deal. But once time passes and we’ve journeyed down our path a little farther, we can look back into the past and see which choices have shaped us the most. And oftentimes, those choices aren’t the ones we think are most important in the moment. The clarity and wisdom of hindsight allows us to realize that doing something like taking the path “less traveled by” has impacted our lives immensely. 

"The Road Not Taken" is also about our perspective...and how hindsight helps us reconsider our past decision.  

Robert Frost “The Road Not Taken” Theme 2: Perspective and Memory

The other major theme in “The Road Not Taken” is how our individual perspective. 

The speaker of the poem spends most of their time trying to decide which path to take. They describe each path in detail: the first one curves into the undergrowth, while the second was more tempting because it was “grassy” and a little less worn. 

But the truth is that these paths have more in common than not. They’re both in the woods, for one. But the speaker also says the first is “just as fair” as the other, meaning it’s just as pretty or attractive. They also mention that “And both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black,” which is a poetic way of saying that neither path had been walked on in a while. And even the one the poet says is less traveled was actually “worn...about the same” as the first path! 

So it’s t he speaker’s perspective that makes these paths seem divergent rather than them actually being super different from one another! 

Because our perspectives shape the way we understand the world, it also affects our memories.  Our memories help us understand who we are, and they shape the person we become. But as we tell ourselves our own story, we overwrite our memories . It’s kind of like deleting a sentence and retyping it...only for it to change a little bit each time! 

What is your earliest memory? What is your favorite memory? Now think about this: are you remembering them, or are you remembering remembering them? Is there a difference? Yes, because science shows that every single time we recall a memory we change it . It’s very possible that your favorite early memory isn’t your memory at all--it is more likely a memory of being told something that happened to you. Perhaps you have a photograph of a moment that triggers your memory. The photograph may not change, but you do and your memory of the things that happened in that moment do.

So, if our experiences and our choices make us who we are, but we’re constantly misremembering and changing our memories, how do actual events even matter? 

“The Road Not Taken” says that they do. Our choices we make are impactful, but the way we remember them is what helps shape us as individuals. So “The Road Not Taken” isn’t necessarily an ode to bravely taking the less popular path when others wouldn’t. It’s more like an ode to being resigned to believing our choices made us who we are, even though if we hadn’t made them, hadn’t taken that path, we’d be someone else who made choices that were just as valid.

Poetic devices are the tools we can use to unpack the meaning of a poem. Here are two that are important to understanding "The Road Not Taken."

The Top 2 Poetic Devices in “The Road Not Taken”

Poetic devices are literary devices that poets use to enhance and create a poem’s structure, tone, rhythm, and meaning. In Robert Frost’s, “The Road Not Taken,” Frost uses iambic meter and voice to reinforce the poem’s meaning . 

Poetic Device 1: Iambic Meter

First thing’s first: the following is only a short overview of iambic meter. If you want an in-depth discussion of meter, check out our blog about it . 

So what is meter? The English language has about an equal number of stressed and unstressed syllables. Arranging these stressed syllables into consistent is one of the most common ways of giving a poem a structure... and this arrangement is called “meter.” 

A poem’s meter is made up of units. Each “unit” of stressed and unstressed syllables that repeats in a poem is called a foot. A foot can either be an iamb (one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable), a trochee (one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable), a dactyl (one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) or an anapest (two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable). 

The iamb is the foot that comes to us most naturally as native English speakers, and the most iambs we can speak easily without having to inhale for another breath is about five. So the most common structure for English language poetry is iambic pentameter , meaning the most common foot is an iamb, and there are five iambs per line. Historically, the vast majority of poetry written in English has been in iambic pentameter, and it was the default format for English poetry for centuries.

But pentameter isn’t the only iambic meter : two feet make dimeter, three feet make trimeter, four feet make tetrameter, and six feet make hexameter, and so forth.

The Modernist poets started moving away from these traditional repeating patterns of meter just after World War I, using invented patterns called “free verse.” Although Modernist free verse didn’t replace metrical verse overnight or completely, it slowly broke down the central importance of it in ways that are still felt today. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is from the very tail end of the iambic-meter-as-a-necessity era. Frost stubbornly and famously stuck to the traditional metrical forms , comparing free verse to playing tennis “with the net down.”

It is the iambic meter that gives the poem its “old-fashioned” rhythm and comfortable feeling. It’s also the thing that makes the poem sound so natural when you read it out loud. You may not even immediately recognize that the poem is in iambic meter, but it becomes clear when you start breaking down the lines. Take this one, for example:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

Looking at the stressed and unstressed syllables we get:

two ROADS/di-VERGED/in a YELL/ow WOOD

The capitalized syllables are stressed, and the lowercase ones aren’t. Each pair of these is an iamb! 

There are four stressed syllables on this line , as well as every other line in the poem. That means this poem is in iambic tetrameter. The most common foot is an iamb (although notice that the third foot is an anapest), and there are four of them.

So why is this important? First, iambic tetrameter is a metrical pattern favored by the 19th century Romantics , who very frequently wrote poems that involved lonely people having great epiphanies while out in nature by themselves. By mimicking that style, Frost pulls on a long poetic tradition helps readers hone in on some of the major themes of his poem--specifically, that the speaker’s decision in the woods will have long-term consequences for both their character and their life. 

The iambic form also rolls off of the tongue easily because it’s the most common meter in the English language. That also echoes the importance of nature in “The Road Not Taken”: both in terms of the natural imagery in the poem, but also in its discussion of the nature of perspective and memory. In that way, the form of the poem helps to reinforce its themes! 

Poetic Device 2: Voice

The second poetic device that Frost employs is voice. The voice of a poem is the product of all the stylistic and vocabulary choices that add up to create a character . In this case, the poem has one character: the speaker. The speaker is unnamed, and it’s through their perspective that we experience the poem. It’s easy to think of the speaker as being Frost himself, but try to resist that temptation. The voice of a poem is an artificial construct, a character created to give the poem a certain effect.\

So how does Frost create this voice? First, note that the poem is in first person . That means we’re getting the speaker’s perspective in their own words, signaled by their use of first person pronouns like “I.” Additionally, the audience isn’t being addressed directly (like in Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise). Instead, it’s as if we’ve intruded upon the speaker’s thoughts as they ruminate over the potential ramifications of choosing one path over another.

Writing the poem in first person means that we’re getting the story straight from the horse’s mouth. In some ways, this is a good thing: it helps us understand the speaker’s unique perspective and in their own unique voice. But in other ways, it makes the objective details of the moment less clear. That’s because t he speaker’s recounting of the moment in the woods is colored by his own memory. That means we have to rely on the speaker’s interpretation of events...and decide how that impacts our interpretation of the poem! The first person narration also gives the poem much of its reflective nature.

What’s Next?

Analyzing poetry can be tricky, so it’s helpful to read a few expert analyses. We have a bunch on our blog that you can read through, like this one about Dylan Thomas’ “Do not go gentle into that good night” or this article that explains 10 different sonnets!

It’s much easier to analyze poetry when you have the right tools to do it! Don’t miss our in-depth guides to poetic devices like assonance , iambic pentameter , and allusion .

If you’re more about writing poetry than analyzing it, we’ve got you covered! Here are five great tips for writing poetry (and a few scholarships for budding poets , too).

These recommendations are based solely on our knowledge and experience. If you purchase an item through one of our links, PrepScholar may receive a commission.

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“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost: Analysis

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, originally published in 1916, was part of his collection Mountain Interval.

• Two roads 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 in the undergrowth;
• Then took the other, as just as fair,
• And having perhaps the better claim,
• Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
• Though as for that the passing there
• Had worn them really about the same,
• And both that morning equally lay
• In leaves no step had trodden black.
• Oh, I kept the first for another day!
• Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
• I doubted if I should ever come back.
• I shall be telling this with a sigh
• Somewhere ages and ages hence:
• Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
• I took the one less traveled by,
• And that has made all the difference.

Introduction: “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Table of Contents

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, originally published in 1916, was part of his collection Mountain Interval . The poem explores the theme of choices and their lasting consequences. Frost presents a speaker at a literal fork in the road, faced with a decision between two seemingly equal paths. With vivid natural imagery, the diverging paths symbolize life’s decisions. What makes “The Road Not Taken” unique is its frequent misinterpretation. While popularly seen as a celebration of individuality, the poem’s final lines contain a note of wistfulness, hinting that all choices carry some degree of regret. This complexity, alongside its enduring popularity, highlights the universality of pondering paths untraveled and the bittersweet nature of decision-making.

Annotations of “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Literary Devices in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Sound and Poetic Devices in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Functions of Literary Devices in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

• Imagery: Frost paints a memorable picture with details like “yellow wood” and the personified roads that “diverged” and “wanted wear.” The alliteration emphasizes the visual setting, while the personification begins the transformation of the roads into a metaphor for life’s choices.
• Tone: Frost’s diction, including words like “sorry,” “long I stood,” and “doubted,” establishes a thoughtful and introspective mood. The repeated “and” creates a sense of the speaker’s uncertainty and hesitation.
• Emphasis: Through the repetition of “two roads,” Frost underscores the poem’s core theme: the weight of choices and their consequences. This reminds the reader of the profound nature of the speaker’s dilemma.
• Meaning: The central metaphor of the roads, representing life choices, gains depth through Frost’s literary skill. The “road less traveled by” symbolizes individuality—choosing based on personal values over following the crowd. The final line, “And that has made all the difference,” suggests the speaker reflects on their choice with a sense of wisdom gained, highlighting the lasting impact decisions hold.

Themes in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

·  Choices and Consequences:

• Key Point: Every decision has a lasting impact, shaping our life’s trajectory.
• Evidence: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” (Line 1) – Symbolizes life’s crossroads.
• Evidence: “And that has made all the difference” (Line 20) – Emphasizes how choices change the course of our lives.

·  Individuality vs. Conformity:

• Key Point: The value of choosing one’s own path, even when unconventional.
• Evidence: “I took the one less traveled by” (Line 18) – The speaker embraces independent thinking.
• Evidence: “…wanting wear” (Line 8) – Paths symbolize societal expectations, the less-traveled one representing nonconformity.

·  The Inevitability of Regret:

• Key Point: Even with satisfaction in our choices, a longing for the “what ifs” can linger.
• Evidence: “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” (Lines 13-14) – The speaker recognizes the finality of the decision.
• Evidence: “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” (Line 15) – A tinge of wistfulness about the path not taken.

·  The Role of Nature:

• Key Point: The natural world provides a setting for self-reflection and symbolizes life’s possibilities.
• Evidence: “yellow wood” (Line 1) – Creates a visual backdrop, potentially hinting at autumn and the passage of time.
• Evidence: “In leaves no step had trodden black” (Line 3) – The pristine paths represent the open, undecided future.

Literary Theories and “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Essay Topics, Questions and Thesis Statements about “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Topics Focusing on Theme

• Question: To what extent does “The Road Not Taken” celebrate individuality, and to what extent does it suggest the potential drawbacks of nonconformity?
• Thesis: While “The Road Not Taken” initially seems to promote independent thinking, a closer reading reveals a wistful tone suggesting a hidden cost to always choosing the path less traveled.
• Question: How does Frost portray the complexities of decision-making, and how does the speaker grapple with the possibility of regret?
• Thesis: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” explores the inevitability of regret, demonstrating how even choices rooted in individuality carry the bittersweet echo of paths untaken.
• Question: How does Frost use natural imagery to symbolize broader themes of life, choice, and the passage of time?
• Thesis: In “The Road Not Taken,” Frost employs the natural world not just as a setting but as a central metaphor. The diverging paths represent life’s choices, and the vibrant imagery underscores the weight of these decisions.

Topics Focusing on Literary Aspects

• Question: How does Frost use ambiguity to create a poem that invites multiple interpretations?
• Thesis: The enduring popularity of “The Road Not Taken” stems from its intentional ambiguity; Frost crafts a poem open to various readings, inviting the reader to project their own experiences onto its themes.
• Question: How does Frost’s use of sound devices (e.g., alliteration, repetition) contribute to the poem’s overall meaning and effect on the reader?
• Thesis: Frost’s careful use of sound devices in “The Road Not Taken” adds lyrical quality while subtly reinforcing the poem’s themes; for example, the repeated “and” mirrors the speaker’s hesitant thought process.

Topics Linking Theory to the Poem

• Question: How does Reader-Response theory explain the widespread misinterpretation of “The Road Not Taken” as a purely celebratory poem about individuality?
• Thesis: Popular readings of “The Road Not Taken” reveal how readers often project a desire for empowerment onto the text, overlooking subtle hints of regret that create a more nuanced meaning.

Short Question-Answer about “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Literary Works Similar to “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

• “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost:
•  Shares a focus on solitary contemplation within a natural setting. Both poems explore the allure of pausing one’s journey and diverging from the expected path, highlighting the tensions between societal expectations and individual desires.
• “Choose Something Like a Star” by Robert Frost: Emphasizes the importance of striving towards ambitious goals. This aligns with the message in “The Road Not Taken” that choosing the path less traveled can lead to a more meaningful and fulfilling life.
• Short Stories:
• “The Garden of Forking Paths” by Jorge Luis Borges: This complex narrative explores a concept of infinite realities branching from each decision made. It resonates with the theme in Frost’s poem that every choice alters the course of our lives.
• “The Midnight Library” by Matt Haig: Presents a protagonist who experiences alternate lives based on different choices. This emphasizes the profound impact of decisions and explores the potential for longing for the paths not taken, a core concept within “The Road Not Taken.”

Key Points of Similarity:

• The Centrality of Choice: These works all delve into the weight of decision-making and the lasting impact our choices have on our life trajectories.
• Contemplation of Paths Untaken: They tap into the universal human fascination with potential alternate lives and the lingering sense of “what if” that accompanies our decisions.
• Symbolic Journeys: Like Frost, many of these authors employ the metaphor of roads, paths, or journeys to represent broader life experiences and the choices we make along the way.

Suggested Readings: “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Scholarly articles.

• Explores recurring themes and stylistic features of Frost’s poetry, which can inform analysis of “The Road Not Taken.”
• A biographical and critical study, potentially offering insights into Frost’s mindset when composing the poem and how it fits within his larger body of work.
• Axelrod, Steven Gould. “The Poetry of Robert Frost.” Twentieth Century Literature , vol. 35, no. 4, 1989, pp. 498–514. JSTOR , [www.jstor.org/stable/441554]
• Look for the text of “The Road Not Taken” and potential critical essays or background information related to the poem.
• Search for Robert Frost’s profile to find biographical information and whether they have specific resources on “The Road Not Taken.”

Related posts:

• “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray
• “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe
• “The Darkling Thrush” by Thomas Hardy: Analysis
• “The Lady of Shalott” by Lord Tennyson: Analysis

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The Road Not Taken

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Two roads 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 in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

From The Poetry of Robert Frost by Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright 1916, 1923, 1928, 1930, 1934, 1939, 1947, 1949, © 1969 by Holt Rinehart and Winston, Inc. Copyright 1936, 1942, 1944, 1945, 1947, 1948, 1951, 1953, 1954, © 1956, 1958, 1959, 1961, 1962 by Robert Frost. Copyright © 1962, 1967, 1970 by Leslie Frost Ballantine.

More by this poet

A line-storm song.

The line-storm clouds fly tattered and swift,    The road is forlorn all day,  Where a myriad snowy quartz stones lift,    And the hoof-prints vanish away.  The roadside flowers, too wet for the bee,   Expend their bloom in vain.  Come over the hills and far with me,    And be my love in the rain. 

Not to Keep

They sent him back to her. The letter came Saying... and she could have him. And before She could be sure there was no hidden ill Under the formal writing, he was in her sight— Living.— They gave him back to her alive— How else? They are not known to send the dead— And not disfigured visibly. His face?—

A Time to Talk

When a friend calls to me from the road And slows his horse to a meaning walk, I don’t stand still and look around On all the hills I haven’t hoed, And shout from where I am, What is it? No, not as there is a time to talk. I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground, Blade-end up and five feet tall,

Anything Can Happen

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now He galloped his thunder cart and his horses Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth And the clogged underearth, the River Styx, The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. Anything can happen, the tallest towers Be overturned, those in high places daunted, Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one,

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• “Nihilism, Shmihilism”
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The Road Not Taken

By david orr, reviewed by christopher spaide.

For a half century, Robert Frost has been the most unavoidable of American poets: the nation’s inaugural inaugural poet, laureate of swinging birches and snowy evenings, a fixture as essential to the middle-school classroom as the chalkboard. He has also been our most defended poet: Frost’s respectable partisans, among them Lionel Trilling, Randall Jarrell, Joseph Brodsky, and Paul Muldoon, have insisted that we look more closely at the true Frost, a poet less lovely, more dark and deep, than the Frost we were taught to love. “The Other Frost” (to quote the title of a Jarrell essay) is not a populist, apparently patriotic bard, but a modernist whom you might call (depending on whose Frost you’re meeting) coy, playful, mischievous, malevolent, an unsparing skeptic (if not an atheist), or an unappeasable pessimist (if not a downright nihilist). These corrective lenses have scandalized casual readers, but they utterly delighted Frost: when, at Frost’s eighty-fifth birthday dinner, Trilling shocked guests by toasting Frost as “a terrifying poet,” Frost responded with a thank-you note: “You made my birthday party a surprise party.”

The latest defense of Frost—the longest, most publicized, and most extravagantly subtitled to date—is David Orr’s The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong . Orr is a pithy, pushy poetry columnist for the New York Times Book Review , and the author of one previous book, Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry (2011). On face, The Road Not Taken looks like that earlier book, which performed a particular service for a particular audience: if you’ve always wanted to vacation to that foreign destination called Poetry, but simply don’t have the time, Orr’s travel guide will save you the trouble by condensing all that beautiful, pointless sightseeing into 200 pages. (This is Orr’s metaphor: in its introduction, Beautiful & Pointless analogizes modern poetry with Belgium, a beautiful and pointless country.)

But Orr’s new book is far subtler, stranger, and more subversive than his last, a how-to that admits defeat page after page, a manual for the uninitiated which never dumbs down or tidies up its unsettling suggestions. Orr has written the rare book on poetry that does not discriminate between audiences: newcomers and experts, Americans and Belgians, This Frost or the Other Frost, you or me or Orr. Why? We’re all wrong.

Orr’s Frost evolves into an unmanageable poet, but he starts off as something simple: the author of “The Road Not Taken,” a poem whose ubiquity goes without saying. Orr says it anyway, finding the poem’s deep cultural seepage in Ford commercials, rap lyrics, journalistic clichés, “one of the foundational texts of modern self-help” ( The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth ), and over four hundred books “on subjects ranging from political theory to the impending zombie apocalypse.” (Orr overlooks the prevalence of the phrase “the road less traveled” in America’s sex columns ; his arguments suffer accordingly.) Whether or not you’ve actively tried to memorize this poem, you likely have its best-known phrases stored in your vocabulary. Or you know its moves, its progression of steps forth and looks back, the way you half remember a joke: a man walks into a yellow wood, two roads diverge, he chooses “the one less traveled by,” that makes all the difference, America-brand individualism wins again.

The punch line, Orr reveals, is that the road “less traveled by” apparently wasn’t: worn down by passersby “really about the same,” both roads “that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” Take these lines literally, and the speaker’s sonorous conclusion—“I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference”—sounds less like measured stock-taking than an after-the-fact justification. For champions of the Other Frost (and for Frost himself), “The Road Not Taken” is a dark joke at the expense of a self-deluding speaker—as Orr articulates the position: “The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.” But Orr is too hesitant, too baffled, to fix the poem with one definitive reading, whether as “a paean to triumphant self-assertion” or as that paean’s wicked parody. Oscillating between extremes, “The Road Not Taken” ceases to be about a particular choice and becomes “about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.”

Orr is not the first reader to complicate Frost’s greatest hit: see books on and by Frost , reviews of those books , even Orange Is the New Black . Orr makes his most original points, and finds his winningly self-skeptical voice, in the book’s four central chapters. All four work as discrete lessons on how to break into almost any poem; all four fail, exasperatingly but instructively, at cracking “The Road Not Taken.” In “The Poet,” Orr introduces a man as indecipherable as his best-known poem, obscured by biased biographers, adulatory defenders, and his own designing performance as America’s sour, lovable, libertarian sage (a role the culture now fills with Ron Swanson). In “The Poem,” Orr relates how “The Road Not Taken” was misunderstood by its very first reader and dedicatee, the English critic-poet Edward Thomas, and finds openings for that misunderstanding throughout the poem, from its title (which road wasn’t taken, and by whom?) to its final word. In the trendily interdisciplinary “The Choice,” Orr turns the poem into a case study for contemporary sociology, philosophy, marketing, and even neuroscience (Frost’s two roads map comfortably onto the brain’s left and right hemispheres). And in “The Chooser,” Frost’s poem serves as confirmation for two mutually exclusive notions of American personhood, the self as moment-to-moment construction and the self as wholesale discovery.

By now, Orr has perfected strategies for exposing poetry to new audiences. His deftest is a bait and switch: he gives airtime to outsider assumptions (“Poets, we assume, are not popular—at least after 1910 or so”) and hard-to-gauge truisms (“Poetry has always oscillated between guardedness and fervor”) only to second-guess, backtrack, uncover exceptions. Orr’s off-topic jokiness, which spurs the taut comic routines of his journalism (and, unchecked in Beautiful & Pointless , produces a dinner full of dad jokes), is absent, replaced by a single-minded drive to let no easy reading stand. The result is not only a compilation of brilliant explanations for non-experts, on topics both poetic and not—Frost’s metrical theory of “the sound of sense,” or “the border of determinism and free will”—but also “a guide to modern poetry” far more welcoming, more wide-ranging, than Orr’s first book.

It’s also wrong—“wrong” in the way Orr’s subtitle informs us that “almost everyone” is wrong, subject to unacknowledged biases, overinflated claims, indigestible self-contradiction. As the book progresses, “The Road Not Taken” builds up into everything and nothing: on one page, it “captures the difficult essence of American experience”; on the next, it’s a funhouse of deception and distortion. Frost comes across as the century’s most prescient thinker, encoding contemporary philosophy and psychology into gnomic lines, but also as a modernist supervillain, bent on deceiving all audiences, himself included. That Orr never even tries to resolve these contradictions is not a demerit but this book’s great unspoken lesson. The further you get into “The Road Not Taken,” or any inexhaustible poem, the notion of any one unequivocally “right” reading seems more and more like an illusion. Depending on how you view it, Orr’s shrewd guide will teach you how to read Frost in many “right” ways, or how to read him spectacularly wrong. Thankfully, it doesn’t make a difference.

Published on April 29, 2016

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Robert Frost

The road not taken.

William H. Pritchard

On December 16, 1916, he received a warm letter from Meiklejohn, looking forward to his presence at Amherst and saying that that morning in chapel he had read aloud "The Road Not Taken," "and then told the boys about your coming. They applauded vigorously and were evidently much delighted by the prospect."

Alexander Meiklejohn was an exceptionally high-minded educator whose principles and whose moral tone toward things may be illustrated most briefly and clearly by some statements from his essay "What the College Is." This, his inaugural address as president of Amherst, was printed for a time as an introduction to the college catalogue. What the college was, or should be -what Meiklejohn hoped to make Amherst into - was a place to be thought of as "liberal," that is, "essentially intellectual": "The college is primarily not a place of the body, nor of the feelings, nor even of the will; it is, first of all, a place of the mind." Introducing "the boys" to the intellectual life led for its own sake, would save them from pettiness and dullness, would save them from being one of what Meiklejohn referred to as "the others":

There are those among us who will find so much satisfaction in the countless trivial and vulgar amusements of a crude people that they have no time for the joys of the mind. There are those who are so closely shut up within a little round of petty pleasures they that have never dreamed of the fun of reading and conversing and investigating and reflecting.

A liberal education would rescue boys from stupidity, its purpose being to draw from that "reality-loving American boy" something like "an intellectual enthusiasm." But this result could not be achieved, Meiklejohn added, without a thorough reversal of the curriculum: "I should like to see every freshman at once plunged into the problems of philosophy," he said with enthusiasm.

Now, five years after his address, he was bringing to Amherst someone outside the usual academic orbit, a poet who lacked even a college degree. But despite - or perhaps because of - this lack, the poet had escaped triviality, was an original mind who knew about living by ideas. For he had written among other poems "The Road Not Taken," given pride of place in the just-published Mountain Interval as not only its first poem but also printed in italics, as though to make it also a preface to and motto for the poems which followed. It was perfect for Meiklejohn's purposes because it was no idle reverie, no escape through lovely language into a soothing dream world, but a poem rather which announced itself to be "about" important issues in life: about the nature of choice, of decision, of how to go in one direction rather than another and how to feel about the direction you took and didn't take. For President Meiklejohn and for the assembled students at compulsory chapel, it might have been heard as a stirring instance of what the "liberal college" was all about, since it showed how, instead of acceding to the petty pleasures, the "countless trivial and vulgar amusements" offered by the world or the money-god or the values of the marketplace, an individual could go his own way, live his own life, read his own books, take the less traveled road:

The poem ended, the boys "applauded vigorously," and surely Meiklejohn congratulated himself just a bit on making the right choice, taking the less traveled road and inviting a poet to join the Amherst College faculty.

What the president could hardly have imagined, committed as he was in high seriousness to making the life of the college truly an intellectual one, was the unruliness of Frost's spirit and its unwillingness to be confined within the formulas - for Meiklejohn, they were the truths - of the "liberal college." On the first day of the new year, 1917, just preparatory to moving his family down from the Franconia farm into a house in Amherst, Frost wrote Untermeyer about where the fun lay in what he, Frost, thought of as "intellectual activity":

You get more credit for thinking if you restate formulae or cite cases that fall in easily under formulae, but all the fun is outside saying things that suggest formulae that won't formulate - that almost but don't quite formulate. I should like to be so subtle at this game as to seem to the casual person altogether obvious. The casual person would assume I meant nothing or else I came near enough meaning something he was familiar with to mean it for all practical purposes. Well, well, well.

The "fun" is "outside," and lies in doing something like teasing, suggesting formulae that don't formulate, or not quite. The fun is not in being "essentially intellectual" or in manifesting "intellectual enthusiasm" in Meiklejohn's sense of the phrase, but in being "subtle," and not just subtle but so much so as to fool "the casual person" into thinking that what you said was obvious. If we juxtapose these remarks with his earlier determination to reach out as a poet to all sorts and kinds of people, and if we think of "The Road Not Taken" as a prime example of a poem which succeeded in reaching out and taking hold, then something interesting emerges about the kind of relation to other people, to readers - or to students and college presidents - Frost was willing to live with, indeed to cultivate.

For the large moral meaning which "The Road Not Taken" seems to endorse - go, as I did, your own way, take the road less traveled by, and it will make "all the difference"-does not maintain itself when the poem is looked at more carefully. Then one notices how insistent is the speaker on admitting, at the time of his choice, that the two roads were in appearance "really about the same," that they "equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black," and that choosing one rather than the other was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say that the road taken had "perhaps the better claim." But in the final stanza, as the tense changes to future, we hear a different story, one that will be told "with a sigh" and "ages and ages hence." At that imagined time and unspecified place, the voice will have nobly simplified and exalted the whole impulsive matter into a deliberate one of taking the "less traveled" road:

Is it not the high tone of poignant annunciation that really makes all the difference? An earlier version of the poem had no dash after "I"; presumably Frost added it to make the whole thing more expressive and heartfelt. And it was this heartfelt quality which touched Meiklejohn and the students.

Yet Frost had written Untermeyer two years previously that "I'll bet not half a dozen people can tell you who was hit and where he was hit in my Road Not Taken," and he characterized himself in that poem particularly as "fooling my way along." He also said that it was really about his friend Edward Thomas, who when they walked together always castigated himself for not having taken another path than the one they took. When Frost sent "The Road Not Taken" to Thomas he was disappointed that Thomas failed to understand it as a poem about himself, but Thomas in return insisted to Frost that "I doubt if you can get anybody to see the fun of the thing without showing them and advising them which kind of laugh they are to turn on." And though this sort of advice went exactly contrary to Frost's notion of how poetry should work, he did on occasion warn his audiences and other readers that it was a tricky poem. Yet it became a popular poem for very different reasons than what Thomas referred to as "the fun of the thing." It was taken to be an inspiring poem rather, a courageous credo stated by the farmer-poet of New Hampshire. In fact, it is an especially notable instance in Frost's work of a poem which sounds noble and is really mischievous. One of his notebooks contains the following four-line thought:

The mischievous aspect of "The Road Not Taken" is what makes it something un-boring, for there is little in its language or form which signals an interesting poem. But that mischief also makes it something other than a "sincere" poem, in the way so many readers have taken Frost to be sincere. Its fun is outside the formulae it seems almost but not quite to formulate.

From Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. Copyright © 1984 by William Pritchard.

A close look at the poem reveals that Frost's walker encounters two nearlv identical paths: so he insists, repeatedly. The walker looks down one, first, then the other, "as just as fair." Indeed, "the passing there / Had worn them reallv about the same." As if the reader hasn't gotten the message, Frost says for a third time. "And both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black." What, then, can we make of the final stanza? My guess is that Frost, the wily ironist, is saying something like this: "When I am old, like all old men, I shall make a myth of my life. I shall pretend, as we all do, that I took the less traveled road. But I shall be lying." Frost signals the mockingly self-inflated tone of the last stanza by repeating the word "I," which rhymes - several times - with the inflated word "sigh." Frost wants the reader to know that what he will be saying, that he took the road less traveled, is a fraudulent position, hence the sigh.

"THE ROAD NOT TAKEN" can be read against a literary and pictorial tradition that might be called "The Choice of the Two Paths, " reaching not only back to the Gospels and beyond them to the Greeks but to ancient English verse as well. In Reson and Sensuallyte, for example, John Lydgate explains how he dreamt that Dame Nature had offered him the choice between the Road of Reason and the Road of Sensuality. In art the same choice was often represented by the letter "Y" with the trunk of the letter representing the careless years of childhood and the two paths branching off at the age when the child is expected to exercise discretion. In one design the "Two Paths" are shown in great detail. "On one side a thin line of pious folk ascend a hill past several churches and chapels, and so skyward to the Heavenly City where an angel stands proffering a crown. On the other side a crowd of men and women are engaged in feasting, music, love-making, and other carnal pleasures while close behind them yawns the flaming mouth of hell in which sinners are writhing. But hope is held out for the worldly for some avoid hell and having passed through a dark forest come to the rude huts of Humility and Repentance." Embedded in this quotation is a direct reference to the opening of Dante's Inferno:

From the beginning, when it appeared as the first poem in Mountain Interval (1916), many readers have overstated the importance of "The Road Not Taken" to Frost's work. Alexander Meiklejohn, president of Amherst College, did so when, announcing the appointment of the poet to the school's faculty he recited it to a college assembly.

"The Choice of Two Paths" is suggested in Frost's decision to make his two roads not very much different from one another, for passing over one of them had the effect of wearing them "really about the same." This is a far cry from, say, the description of the "two waies " offered in the seventeenth century by Henry Crosse:

Two waies are proposed and laide open to all, the one inviting to vertue, the other alluring to vice; the first is combersome, intricate, untraded, overgrowne, and many obstacles to dismay the passenger; the other plaine, even beaten, overshadowed with boughes, tapistried with flowers, and many objects to feed the eye; now a man that lookes but only to the outward shewe, will easily tread the broadest pathe, but if hee perceive that this smooth and even way leads to a neast of Scorpions: or a litter of Beares, he will rather take the other though it be rugged and unpleasant, than hazard himselfe in so great a daunger.

Frost seems to have deliberately chosen the word "roads" rather than "waies" or "paths" or even "pathways." In fact, on one occasion when he was asked to recite his famous poem, "Two paths diverged in a yellow wood," Frost reacted with such feeling—"Two roads!"—that the transcription of his reply made it necessary both to italicize the word "roads" and to follow it with an exclamation point. Frost recited the poem all right, but, as his friend remembered, "he didn't let me get away with 'two paths!'"

Convinced that the poem was deeply personal and directly self-revelatory Frost's readers have insisted on tracing the poem to one or the other of two facts of Frost's life when he was in his late thirties. (At the beginning of the Inferno Dante is thirty-five, "midway on the road of life," notes Charles Eliot Norton.) The first of these, an event, took place in the winter of 1911-1912 in the woods of Plymouth, New Hampshire, while the second, a general observation and a concomitant attitude, grew out of his long walks in England with Edward Thomas, his newfound Welsh-English poet-friend, in 1914.

In Robert Frost: The Trial by Existence, Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant locates in one of Frost's letters the source for "The Road Not Taken." To Susan Hayes Ward the poet wrote on February 10, 1912:

Two lonely cross-roads that themselves cross each other I have walked several times this winter without meeting or overtaking so much as a single person on foot or on runners. The practically unbroken condition of both for several days after a snow or a blow proves that neither is much travelled. Judge then how surprised I was the other evening as I came down one to see a man, who to my own unfamiliar eyes and in the dusk looked for all the world like myself, coming down the other, his approach to the point where our paths must intersect being so timed that unless one of us pulled up we must inevitably collide. I felt as if I was going to meet my own image in a slanting mirror. Or say I felt as we slowly converged on the same point with the same noiseless yet laborious stride as if we were two images about to float together with the uncrossing of someone's eyes. I verily expected to take up or absorb this other self and feel the stronger by the addition for the three-mile journey home. But I didn't go forward to the touch. I stood still in wonderment and let him pass by; and that, too, with the fatal omission of not trying to find out by a comparison of lives and immediate and remote interests what could have brought us by crossing paths to the same point in a wilderness at the same moment of nightfall. Some purpose I doubt not, if we could but have made out. I like a coincidence almost as well as an incongruity.

This portentous account of meeting "another" self (but not encountering that self directly and therefore not coming to terms with it) would eventually result in a poem quite different from "The Road Not Taken" and one that Frost would not publish for decades. Elizabeth Sergeant ties the moment with Frost's decision to go off at this time to some place where he could devote more time to poetry. He had also, she implies, filed away his dream for future poetic use.

That poetic use would occur three years later. In 1914 Frost arrived in England for what he then thought would be an extended sabbatical leave from farming in New Hampshire. By all the signs he was ready to settle down for a long stay. Settling in Gloucestershire, he soon became a close friend of Edward Thomas. Later, when readers persisted in misreading "The Road Not Taken," Frost insisted that his poem had been intended as a sly jest at the expense of his friend and fellow poet. For Thomas had invariably fussed over irrevocable choices of the most minor sort made on daily walks with Frost in 1914, shortly before the writing of the poem. Later Frost insisted that in his case the line "And that has made all the difference"—taken straight—was all wrong. "Of course, it hasn't," he persisted, "it's just a poem, you know." In 1915, moreover, his sole intention was to twit Thomas. Living in Gloucestershire, writes Lawrance Thompson, Frost had frequently taken long countryside walks with Thomas.

Repeatedly Thomas would choose a route which might enable him to show his American friend a rare plant or a special vista; but it often happened that before the end of such a walk Thomas would regret the choice he had made and would sigh over what he might have shown Frost if they had taken a "better" direction. More than once, on such occasions, the New Englander had teased his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets. . . . Frost found something quaintly romantic in sighing over what might have been. Such a course of action was a road never taken by Frost, a road he had been taught to avoid.

If we are to believe Frost and his biographer, "The Road Not Taken" was intended to serve as Frost's gentle jest at Thomas's expense. But the poem might have had other targets. One such target was a text by another poet who in a different sense might also be considered a "friend": Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poem, "My Lost Youth," had provided Frost with A Boy's Will, the title he chose for his first book.

"The Road Not Taken " can be placed against a passage in Longfellow's notebooks: "Round about what is, lies a whole mysterious world of might be,—a psychological romance of possibilities and things that do not happen. By going out a few minutes sooner or later, by stopping to speak with a friend at a corner, by meeting this man or that, or by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good, or avoid some impending evil, by which the whole current of our lives would have been changed. There is no possible solution to the dark enigma but the one word, 'Providence.'"

Longfellow's tone in this passage is sober, even somber, and anticipates the same qualities in Edward Thomas, as Frost so clearly perceived. Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant had insisted that Frost's dream encounter with his other self at a crossroads in the woods had a " subterranean connection " with the whole of "The Road Not Taken," especially with the poem's last lines:

Undoubtedly. But whereas Longfellow had invoked Providence to account for acts performed and actions not taken, Frost calls attention only to the role of human choice. A second target was the notion that "whatever choice we make, we make at our peril." The words just quoted are Fitz-James Stephen's, but it is more important that Frost encountered them in William James's essay "The Will to Believe." In fact, James concludes his final paragraph on the topic: "We stand on a mountain pass in the midst of whirling snow and blinding mist, through which we get glimpses now and then of paths which may be deceptive. If we take the wrong road we shall be dashed to pieces. We do not certainly know whether there is any right one. What must we do? 'Be strong and of a good courage.' Act for the best, hope for the best, and take what comes. . . . If death ends all, we cannot meet death better." The danger inherent in decision, in this brave passage quoted with clear-cut approval by the teacher Frost "never had," does not playa part in "The Road Not Taken." Frost the "leaf-treader" will have none of it, though he will not refuse to make a choice. Nothing will happen to him through default. Nor, argues the poet, is it likely that anyone will melodramatically be dashed to pieces.

It is useful to see Frost's projected sigh as a nudging criticism of Thomas's characteristic regrets, to note that Frost's poem takes a sly poke at Longfellow's more generalized awe before the notion of what might have happened had it not been for the inexorable workings of Providence, and to see "The Road Not Taken" as a bravura tossing off of Fitz-James Stephen's mountainous and meteorological scenario. We can also project the poem against a poem by Emily Dickinson that Frost had encountered twenty years earlier in Poems, Second Series (1891).

Dickinson's poem is straightforwardly and orthodoxically religious. But it can be seen that beyond the "journey" metaphor Dickinson's poem employs diction—"road" and "forest"—that recalls "The Choice of the Two Paths" trope, the opening lines of the Inferno, and Frost's secular poem "The Road Not Taken."

"The Road Not Taken," perhaps the most famous example of Frost’s own claims to conscious irony and "the best example in all of American poetry of a wolf in sheep's clothing." Thompson documents the ironic impulse that produced the poem as Frost's "gently teasing" response to his good friend, Edward Thomas, who would in their walks together take Frost down one path and then regret not having taken a better direction. According to Thompson, Frost assumes the mask of his friend, taking his voice and his posture, including the un-Frostian sounding line, "I shall be telling this with a sigh," to poke fun at Thomas's vacillations; Frost ever after, according to Thompson, tried to bring audiences to the ironic point, warning one group, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem - very tricky" (Letters xiv-xv). Thompson's critical evaluation is simply that Frost had, in that particular poem, "carried himself and his ironies too subtly," so that the poem is, in effect, a failure (Letters xv). Yet is it simply that - a too exact parody of a mediocre poetic voice, which becomes among the sentimental masses, ironically, one of the most popularly beloved of Frost's "wise" poems? This is the easiest way to come to terms critically with the popularity of "The Road Not Taken" but it is not, perhaps, the only or best way: in this critical case, the road less traveled may indeed be more productive.

For Frost by all accounts was genuinely fond of Thomas. He wrote his only elegy to Thomas and he gives him, in that poem, the highest praise of all from one who would, himself, hope to be a "good Greek": he elegizes Thomas as "First soldier, and then poet, and then both, / Who died a soldier-poet of your race." He recalls Thomas to Amy Lowell, saying "the closest I ever came in friendship to anyone in England or anywhere else in the world I think was with Edward Thomas" (Letters 220). Frost's protean ability to assume dramatic masks never elsewhere included such a friend as Thomas, whom he loved and admired, tellingly, more than "anyone in England or anywhere else in the world" (Letters 220). It might be argued that in becoming Thomas in "The Road Not Taken," Frost momentarily loses his defensive preoccupation with disguising lyric involvement to the extent that ironic weapons fail him. A rare instance in Frost's poetry in which there is a loved and reciprocal figure, the poem is divested of the need to keep the intended reader at bay. Here Frost is not writing about that contentiously erotic love which is predicated on the sexual battles between a man and a woman, but about a higher love, by the terms of the good Greek, between two men. As Plato says in the Symposium (181, b-c), "But the heavenly love springs from a goddess [Aphrodite] whose attributes have nothing of the female, but are altogether male, and who is also the elder of the two, and innocent of any hint of lewdness. And so those who are inspired by this other Love turn rather to the male, preferring the more vigorous and intellectual bent." If the poem is indeed informed by such love, it becomes the most consummate irony of all, as it shows, despite one level of Frost's intentions, how fraternal love can transmute swords to plowshares, how, indeed, two roads can look about the same, be traveled about the same, and be utterly transformed by the traveler. Frost sent this poem as a letter, as a communication in the most basic sense, to a man to whom he says, in "To E. T.," "I meant, you meant, that nothing should remain / Unsaid between us, brother . . . " When nothing is meant to remain unsaid, and when the poet's best hope is to see his friend "pleased once more with words of mine," all simple ironies are made complex. "The Road Not Taken," far from being merely a failure of ironic intent, may be seen as a touchstone for the complexities of analyzing Frost's ironic voices.

Self-reliance in "The Road Not Taken" is alluringly embodied as the outcome of a story presumably representative of all stories of self-hood, and whose central episode is that moment of the turning-point decision, the crisis from which a self springs: a critical decision consolingly, for Frost's American readers, grounded in a rational act when a self, and therefore an entire course of life, are autonomously and irreversibly chosen. The particular Fireside poetic structure in which Frost incarnates this myth of selfhood is the analogical landscape poem, perhaps most famously executed by William Cullen Bryant in "To a Waterfowl," a poem that Matthew Arnold praised as the finest lyric of the nineteenth century and that Frost had by heart as a child thanks to his mother's enthusiasm.

The analogical landscape poem draws its force from the culturally ancient and pervasive idea of nature as allegorical book, in its American poetic setting a book out of which to draw explicit lessons for the conduct of life (nature as self-help text). In its classic Fireside expression, the details of landscape and all natural events are cagily set up for moral summary as they are marched up to the poem's conclusion, like little imagistic lambs to slaughter, for their payoff in uplifting message. Frost appears to recapitulate the tradition 'in his sketching of the yellow wood and the two roads and in his channeling of the poem's course of events right up to the portentous colon ("Somewhere ages and ages hence:") beyond which lies the wisdom that we jot down and take home:

If we couple such tradition-bound thematic structure with Frost's more or less conventional handling of metric, stanzaic form and rhyme scheme, then we have reason enough for Ellery Sedgwick's acceptance of this poem for the Atlantic: no "caviar to the crowd" here.

And yet Frost has played a subtle game in an effort to have it both ways. In order to satisfy the Atlantic and its readers, he hews closely to the requirements of popular genre writing and its mode of poetic production, the mass circulation magazine. But at the same time he has more than a little undermined what that mode facilitates in the realm of American poetic and political ideals. There must be two roads and they must, of course, be different if the choice of one over the other is to make a rational difference ("And that has made all the difference"). But the key fact, that on the particular morning when the choice was made the two roads looked "about the same," makes it difficult to understand how the choice could be rationally grounded on (the poem's key word) perceptible, objective "difference." The allegorical "way" has been chosen, a self has been forever made, but not because a text has been "read" and the "way" of nonconformity courageously, ruggedly chosen. The fact is, there is no text to be read, because reading requires a differentiation of signs, and on that morning clear signifying differences were obliterated. Frost's delivery of this unpleasant news has long been difficult for his readers to hear because he cunningly throws it away in a syntax of subordination that drifts out of thematic focus. The unpleasant news is hard to hear, in addition, because Fireside form demands, and therefore creates the expectation of, readable textual differences in the book of nature. Frost's heavy investment in traditional structure virtually assures that Fireside literary form will override and cover its mischievous handling in this poem.

For a self to be reliant, decisive, nonconformist, there must already be an autonomous self out of which to propel decision. But what propelled choice on that fateful morning? Frost's speaker does not choose out of some rational capacity; he prefers, in fact, not to choose at all. That is why he can admit to what no self-respecting self-reliant self can admit to: that he is "sorry" he "could not travel both/And be one traveler." The good American ending, the last three lines of the poem, is prefaced by two lines of storytelling self-consciousness in which the speaker, speaking in the present to a listener (reader) to whom he has just conveyed "this," his story of the past - everything preceding the last stanza - in effect tells his auditor that in some unspecified future he will tell it otherwise, to some gullible audience, tell it the way they want to hear it, as a fiction of autonomous intention.

The strongly sententious yet ironic last stanza in effect predicts the happy American construction which "The Road Not Taken" has been traditionally understood to endorse — predicts, in other words, what the poem will be sentimentally made into, but from a place in the poem that its Atlantic Monthly reading, as it were, will never touch. The power of the last stanza within the Fireside teleology of analogical landscape assures Frost his popular audience, while for those who get his game — some member, say, of a different audience, versed in the avant-garde little magazines and in the treacheries of irony and the impulse of the individual talent trying, as Pound urged, to "make it new" against the literary and social American grain - for that reader, this poem tells a different tale: that our life-shaping choices are irrational, that we are fundamentally out of control. This is the fabled "wisdom" of Frost, which he hides in a moralizing statement that asserts the consoling contrary of what he knows.

The ironies of this poem have been often enough remarked. Not least among them is the contrast of the title with the better-remembered phrase of the poem's penultimate line: "the [road] less travelled by" (CPPP 103). Which road, after all, is the road "not taken"? Is it the one the speaker takes, which, according to his last description of it, is "less travelled"-that is to say, not taken by others? Or does the title refer to the supposedly better-traveled road that the speaker himself fails to take? Precisely who is not doing the taking? This initial ambiguity sets in play equivocations that extend throughout the poem. Of course, the broadest irony in the poem derives from the fact that the speaker merely asserts that the road he takes is "less travelled": the second and third stanzas make clear that "the passing there" had worn these two paths "really about the same" and that "both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black." Strong medial caesurae in the poem's first ten lines comically emphasize the "either-or" deliberations in which the speaker is engaged, and which have, apparently, no real consequence: nothing issues from them. Only in the last stanza is any noticeable difference between the two roads established, and that difference is established by fiat: the speaker simply declares that the road he took was less travelled. There is nothing to decide between them. There is no meaningful "choice" to make, or rather no more choice than is meaningfully apparent to the "step-careless" politician of Frost's parable of decision in "The Constant Symbol."

Comical as "The Road Not Taken" may be, there is serious matter in it, as my reading of "The Constant Symbol" is meant to suggest. "Step-carelessness" has its consequences; choices—even when they are undertaken so lightly as to seem unworthy of the name "choice"—are always more momentous, and very often more providential, than we suppose. There may be, one morning in a yellow wood, no difference between two roads—say, the Democratic and the Republican parties. But "way leads on to way," as Frost's speaker says, and pretty soon you find yourself in the White House. As I argue throughout this chapter, this is the indifference that Frost wants us to see: "youthful step-carelessness" really is a form of "step-carefulness." But it is only by setting out, by working our way well into the wood, that we begin to understand the meaning of the choices we make and the character of the self that is making them; in fact, only then can we properly understand our actions as choices. The speaker vacillates in the first three stanzas of "The Road Not Taken," but his vacillations, viewed in deeper perspective, seem, and in fact really are, "decisive." We are too much in the middle of things, Frost seems to be saying, ever to understand when we are truly "acting" and "deciding" and when we are merely reacting and temporizing. Our paths unfold themselves to us as we go. We realize our destination only when we arrive at it, though all along we were driven toward it by purposes we may rightly claim, in retrospect, as our own. Frost works from Emerson's recognition in "Experience":

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended; there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of sight. But the Genius which, according to the old belief, stands at the door by which we enter, and gives us the lethe to drink, that we may tell no tales, mixed the cup too strongly, and we cannot shake off the lethargy now at noonday. ...If any of us knew what we were doing, or where we are going, then when we think we best know! We do not know today whether we are busy or idle. In times when we thought ourselves indolent, we have afterwards discovered, that much was accomplished, and much was begun in us. (Essays 471)

Frost's is an Emersonian philosophy in which indecisiveness and decision feel very much alike—a philosophy in which acting and being acted upon form indistinguishable aspects of a single experience. There is obviously a contradiction in "The Road Not Taken" between the speaker's assertion of difference in the last stanza and his indifferent account of the roads in the first three stanzas. But it is a contradiction more profitably described—in light of Frost's other investigations of questions about choice, decision, and action—as a paradox. He lets us see, as I point out above, that every action is in some degree intemperate, incalculable, "step-careless." The speaker of "The Road Not Taken," like the politician described in "The Constant Symbol," is therefore a figure for us all. This complicates the irony of the poem, saving it from platitude on the one hand (the M. Scott Peck reading) and from sarcasm on the other (the biographical reading of the poem merely as a joke about Edward Thomas). I disagree with Frank Lentricchia's suggestion in Modernist Quartet that "The Road Not Taken" shows how "our life- shaping choices are irrational, that we are fundamentally out of control" (75). The author of "The Trial by Existence" would never contend that we are fundamentally out of control—or at least not do so in earnest.

"The Road Not Taken" is an ironic commentary on the autonomy of choice in a world governed by instincts, unpredictable contingencies, and limited possibilities. It parodies and demurs from the biblical idea that God is the "way" that can and should be followed and the American idea that nature provides the path to spiritual enlightenment. The title refers doubly to bravado for choosing a road less traveled but also to regret for a road of lost possibility and the eliminations and changes produced by choice. "The Road Not Taken " reminds us of the consequences of the principle of selection in al1 aspects of life, namely that al1 choices in knowledge or in action exclude many others and lead to an ironic recognitions of our achievements. At the heart of the poem is the romantic mythology of flight from a fixed world of limited possibility into a wilderness of many possibilities combined with trials and choices through which the pilgrim progresses to divine perfection. I agree with Frank Lentricchia's view that the poem draws on "the culturally ancient and pervasive idea of nature as allegorical book, out of which to draw explicit lessons for the conduct of life (nature as self-help text)." I would argue that what it is subverting is something more profound than the sentimental expectations of genteel readers of fireside poetry. . . .

The drama of the poem is of the persona making a choice between two roads. As evolved creatures, we should be able to make choices, but the poem suggests that our choices are irrational and aesthetic. The sense of meaning and morality derived from choice is not reconciled but, rather obliterated and canceled by a nonmoral monism. Frost is trying to reconcile impulse with a con- science that needs goals and harbors deep regrets. The verb Frost uses is taken, which means something less conscious than chosen. The importance of this opposition to Frost is evident in the way he changed the tide of "Take Something Like a Star" to "Choose Something Like a Star," and he continued to alter tides in readings and publications. Take suggests more of an unconscious grasp than a deliberate choice. (Of course, it also suggests action as opposed to deliberation.) In "The Road Not Taken" the persona's reasons wear thin, and choice is confined by circumstances and the irrational:

[lines 1-10]

Both roads had been worn "about the same," though his "taking" the second is based on its being less worn. The basis of selection is individuation, variation, and "difference": taking the one "less traveled by." That he "could not travel both / And be one traveler" means not only that he will never be able to return but also that experience alters the traveler; he would not be the same by the time he came back. Frost is presenting an antimyth in which origin, destination, and return are undermined by a nonprogressive development. And the hero has only illusory choice. This psychological representation of the developmental principle of divergence strikes to the core of Darwinian theory. Species are made and survive when individuals diverge from others in a branching scheme, as the roads diverge for the speaker. The process of selection implies an unretracing process of change through which individual kinds are permanently altered by experience. Though the problem of making a choice at a crossroads is almost a commonplace, the drama of the poem conveys a larger mythology by including evolutionary metaphors and suggesting the passage of eons.

The change of tense in the penultimate line—to took—is part of the speaker's projection of what he "shall be telling," but only retrospectively and after "ages and ages." Though he cannot help feeling free in selection, the speaker's wisdom is proved only through survival of an unretraceable course of experience:

[lines 11-20]

The poem leaves one wondering how much "difference" is implied by all, given that the "roads" already exist, that possibilities are limited. Exhausted possibilities of human experience diminish great regret over "the road not taken" or bravado for "the road not taken" by everyone else. The poem does raise questions about whether there is any justice in the outcome of one's choices or anything other than aesthetics, being "fair," in our moral decisions. The speaker's impulse to individuation is mitigated by a moral dilemma of being unfair or cruel, in not stepping on leaves, "treading" enough to make them "black. " It might also imply the speaker's recognition that individuation will mean treading on others.

#1916 #AmericanWriters #DecisionMaking #FreeWill #Human #MountainInterval #Nature

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The last step taken found your hef… Decidedly upon the left. One more would throw you on the ri… Another still—you see your plight. You call this thinking, but it’s w…

Others taunt me with having knelt… Always wrong to the light, so neve… Deeper down in the well than where… Gives me back in a shining surface… Me myself in the summer heaven god…

Lovers, forget your love, And list to the love of these, She a window flower, And he a winter breeze. When the frosty window veil

When I got up through the mowing… The headless aftermath, Smooth-laid like thatch with the h… Half closes the garden path. And when I come to the garden gro…

I slumbered with your poems on my… Spread open as I dropped them hal… Like dove wings on a figure on a t… To see, if in a dream they brought… I might not have the chance I mis…

But Islands of the Blessèd, bless… I never came upon a blessèd one.

The swinging mill bell changed its… To tolling like the count of fate, And though at that the tardy ran, One failed to make the closing gat… There was a law of God or man

You like to hear about gold. A king filled his prison room As full as the room could hold To the top of his reach on the wal… With every known shape of the stuf…

A dented spider like a snow drop w… On a white Heal-all, holding up a… Like a white piece of lifeless sat… Saw ever curious eye so strange a… Portent in little, assorted death…

There’s a patch of old snow in a c… That I should have guessed Was a blow—away paper the rain Had brought to rest. It is speckled with grime as if

The city had withdrawn into itself And left at last the country to th… When between whirls of snow not co… And whirls of foliage not yet laid… A stranger to our yard, who looked…

He halted in the wind, and– what… Far in the maples, pale, but not a… He stood there bringing March aga… And yet too ready to believe the m… ‘Oh, that’s the Paradise-in-bloom…

As I went down the hill along the… There was a gate I had leaned at… And had just turned from when I f… As you came up the hill. We met.… We did that day was mingle great a…

Thus of old the Douglas did: He left his land as he was bid With the royal heart of Robert th… In a golden case with a golden lid… To carry the same to the Holy Lan…

The people along the sand All turn and look one way. They turn their back on the land. They look at the sea all day. As long as it takes to pass

“The Road Not Taken” by Frost Essay

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Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” at the beginning of the 1900s to underline the difficulty of choices that people have to make. However, after a close reading, it is possible to define a number of meanings and intentions of the author. Frost discusses the theme of options that are usually available to people and shows the roots of human doubts and concerns. When a person has several options, it is never easy to stay confident, and some regrets and comparisons continue bothering people.

There are four stanzas, each of the five lines in the poem (quintains). The rhyme is masculine, as it is observed between the final stressed syllables in two lines (ABAAB). Both these rhythmic features differ from regular standards of British poems, proving the uniqueness of the poem and the complexity of the ideas that bother the speaker. To share such a composite message with the reader, Frost uses strong figurative language and symbols. Metaphors like “road,” “a yellow wood,” and “grassy and wanted wear” describe the unpredictability of life and the nature of hesitations. Images of leaves and the personification of words set the tone of something fleeting but amazing and powerful. Frost also perfectly applies the repetition of vowels and consonants to make the reader focus on particular parts of the poem and define the mood that has to be followed.

In general, “The Road Not Taken” becomes a classic example of how to combine different literary devices and raise a number of crucial topics in human life. Symbols make it possible to develop the reader’s imagination, and alliteration confirms the power of a poem and rhyme. Life is probably the most complex road people should take, and Frost describes why choices may help and distract, support, and lead astray.

• "I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain" by Emily Dickinson
• Death in Refugee Mother and Child by Achebe, Remember by Rosetti, Crabbit Old Woman by McCormack
• Importance of Phonology
• The life of Robert Frost
• Phonemic Awareness: Short and Long Vowels
• Claude McKay and His Work
• Dream Deferred: Timeless Relevance. Poem and Photograph Review
• The Poems "Cinderella" by Anne Sexton and "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost
• “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America” by June Jordan
• Analysis of ”The Brain - Is Wider Than the Sky” by Emily Dickinson
• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

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The Main Message in Robert Frost’s The Road not Taken

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