the road not taken summary essay

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

Read below our complete notes on the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. Our notes cover The Road Not Taken summary, themes, and a detailed literary analysis.

Background of the Poem

“The Road Not Taken” is a poem by Robert Frost. It was published in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1915. This poem was used as an opening poem of Robert Frost’s collection Mountain Interval in 1916. It presents a narrator who is recalling his journey through the forest when he had to choose between two divergent roads. This poem is one of the most well-known and most often misunderstood poems of Robert Frost. 

Frost’s Inspiration for “The Road Not Taken”

The inspiration of “The Road Not Taken” came when Frost noticed a familiar habit of his close friend in England, Edward Thomas. Frost used to frequently take long walks with Thomas through the countryside. Edward Thomas, an English-Welsh poet, would always regret not taking the other path. Thomas would always sigh over what they would have seen if they had taken the other path. Thomas would think that if they had chosen the other path, it might have offered them many opportunities to see and experience nature. 

At such times of regret, Frost would always tell Thomas that “It does not matter what road you take. You will always regret and wish you had taken the other one.” In this way, Frost wrote this poem to be a light-hearted one but it turned to be more serious and ambiguous for readers. 

Historical Context

There were different historically significant events going on in 1916. Therefore, it is not possible to identify one specific meaning as the one that the poet had in mind. When this poem was written, things of great importance were occurring in the poet’s life and social order. Firstly, in 1916, an act of Congress made “The National Park Services” to keep millions of acres of the forest land safe for the enjoyment of future generations. 

Secondly, Albert Einstein came up with his theory of relativity which claimed that things are dependent on relative circumstances and not on absolute knowledge. The end result of any choice that a person makes is not absolute. This affected the thinking of people to a great extent. They started treating events and feelings relative. The pleasing connection with nature and one’s personal feelings regarding one’s future are the main subjects of this poem. 

Industrial Revolution and World War I

The industrial revolution in the late 1800s brought advances in international commerce through advances in travel and communication. It became difficult for economic powers like the U.S. and Japan to stay uninvolved. The American public wanted no involvement in World War I. It was a year after this poem was published when America had to choose between joining the war. 

When Frost and his family went home, England was already at war. The central subject of “The Road Not Taken” reflects the position of the two countries where Frost had lived. Britain joined other countries in the fight and America tried to stay away from it. Each side has a good reason to choose their path and face the consequences. 

Urbanization

The relation between people and society is the central core of “The Road Not Taken.” The poet asks the question of whether one must follow the footsteps of the majority or the least traveled path. In 1916, this question was part of the debate. Industrialization was the dominant social force in the last half of the nineteenth-century. 

As factories went up, people came to cities to get jobs. Immigrants from other countries came for the same reason. The cities started to construct new quarters for the coming families. These living quarters were made together on top of one another. It created a frustrating situation for those people who came from open lands. 

By 1916, artists, philosophers, and other sensitive people started questioning the depersonalizing effects of urbanization and industrialization. They were worried about the situation that has changed the nature of human thinking. People followed what the majority was doing and they lost connection with themselves and nature as well. They couldn’t decide on their own and they relied on others for prosperity. This poem raises the question regarding individuality and independence. 

The Road Not Taken Summary

The speaker of the poem walks through a forest where trees have shed their yellow leaves in autumn. He reaches a junction where the road becomes two diverging roads. The speaker is one person; therefore, he regrets that he cannot travel both roads. He stands at the fork in the road for a long time. He tries to see where one of the paths does go. The speaker cannot see very far because the forest is dense. Also, the road is not straight. 

The speaker then takes the other path. He judges the second path as good a choice as the first one. He considers it a better option of the two since it is grassy. The path chosen by the speaker is also less worn than the first path. When the speaker starts walking on the second road, he thinks that the two paths are more or less equally ragged. 

The speaker recalls that both roads were covered with leaves in the morning. These leaves had not been yet turned black by foot walks. He exclaims that he is saving the first road and will travel it some other day. Immediately, the speaker contradicts his statement with the recognition that in one’s life, one road leads to another road. Therefore, it is unlikely to say that he will ever get a chance to come back to the first road. 

The speaker visualizes his distant future when he will be narrating, with a sigh, the story of his choosing which road to travel. The speaker speaks as if he is looking back from his future at the present choice. He says that he had to choose between two roads, and he chose the one which was less traveled. The speaker from the future says that the result of that selection between roads has made all the differences in the speaker’s life. 

Themes in the Poem

The central theme of the poem appears when the speaker faces crossroads. The first line of the poem says that “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” It is a classic conceit for a life decision. The speaker then begins to consider the two options. He tries to select a better choice. However, Frost’s poem claims that our choices are less real than we think. Our power to perceive meaningful differences among options is negligible—the two roads are “as just as fair.” 

According to the poem, fate constantly guides us to take a step forward despite our attempts to exercise free will. Our choices fall inferior to our fate which decides all.

Choices and Uncertainty

In “The Road Not Taken,” the speaker describes himself as a confused person who is facing a situation to choose between two roads. The speaker’s choice acts as an extended metaphor for all the choices that every individual must make in life. Through the speaker’s experience, the poem describes the nature of choices and the situation when a person is forced to choose.

The speaker’s first emotion is “sorrow,” as he regrets the reality that it is impossible to “travel both” roads or to experience both things. The poem explores that every choice demands the loss of opportunity. Also, choices are painful because they are made with incomplete information. 

The speaker seeks to collect as much information as possible by observing “down one (road) as far as I could.” However, there is a limit to what the speaker can see and the rest of the things are out of his sight. The speaker has not enough information about which one path is the right one. No one can truly predict what each choice will bring. This poem reflects the anxiety that everyone experiences whenever they step forward on a new road in life. 

After making a final choice, one loses the opportunity to experience the things that are not chosen. The choice of one thing cuts off the knowledge of the alternate choice. It leaves one with uncertainty and they never know if they had made the right choice.

The final line of the poem is a reminder that one’s choices in life make all the difference. It is the choice that gives identity to a person. 

I ndividualism and nonconformity 

In “The Road Not Taken,” the speaker has to choose between two roads. He chooses the one which is less traveled. The choice between the two roads can be treated as a conventional choice versus unconventional choice. By selecting the less-traveled path, the speaker shows that he values individualism over conformity

While deciding which road to take, the speaker notes that the second is “just as fair” as the first. However, the less worn-out state of the road makes the speaker choose it. Notably, the absence of signs of travel on the chosen path is taken positively rather than negatively. Rather than saying that the road looked as if it had not traveled much, the speaker states that it was “grassy”. Being grassy shows it is the result of a very few people walking on it. The speaker also says that the second road “wanted wear.”

It means that the road itself demanded to walk on it. In this way, the speaker suggests that nonconformity is a positive trait. It also shows that popularity makes things less attractive.

Despite the speaker’s suggestion for nonconformity, the poem remains ambiguous about whether the grassy road will lead to something better. In this way, firstly, the poem states that it is hard to identify what is non-conformist. After choosing the road, the two roads seem about the same. It confuses the speaker more that he does not know if the road was less traveled. The speaker seems to sense that though he or she has attempted to take the road “less traveled,” there’s no actual way to know if it was less traveled.

Secondly, the poem subtly suggests that no guarantee choosing a less walked path will make a positive difference. There is also a third opinion offered by the poem as well. The speaker says that selecting the path made all the differences. It is not the path that makes the difference because no one can truly measure which path is traveled less. The difference is made by choosing a direction that is not conventional. In this way, the poem teaches that it is one’s effort that matters.

Making meaning

This poem suggests that it is less important to think if the speaker’s choice made all the difference from what he believes that it did. People create a fictional version of their lives by making beliefs and meaning when they are not there. However, this poem does not consider meaning-making as deceitful but rather as a part of human life.

Another theme in this poem is indecision. In reality, the speaker of the poem has to choose to travel one road between the two. However, he overthinks and procrastinates. He tries to look for all the experiences he has to face on each road. At last, he decides to take the one that was grassy and less traveled. After making the decision, the speaker still concerns his future and the consequences of his choice. If it was one road, it would be easier for him to travel immediately. Similarly, people face such a situation in their lives, and therefore, they confront indecisiveness. 

Self-belief

The speaker in the poem decides to choose the road himself. He does not rely on someone else to direct him. The speaker seems to have confidence in himself. Therefore, he puts himself responsible for all the consequences in the future regarding his choice in the present. 

This poem suggests that one should have faith in one’s self. Such quality of independent decision- making helps people learn many things. They start valuing their intuition. They build confidence in explaining their decision. In this way, trust in one’s self develops. 

The Road Not Taken Literary Analysis

“The Road Not Taken” is a poem about the struggles of the speaker to decide which one of the two roads he must choose. It has both literal and metaphorical meanings. The two roads symbolize two directions in life to follow. This poem highlights those moments in life when it is necessary to take a firm decision without enough information.

This poem questions a person’s free will and determinism. The speaker in the poem consciously decides which way he has to go. He rejects the path with the bend in it. Also, external factors play an important role in his decision-making process.

This poem is about the sacrifices that one has to make. To make a difference, a person has to prefer one option over another and belief in him.

The poet travels on foot in the woods. He reaches a junction where two roads diverged. Suddenly, he realizes that as a single traveler, he can’t travel both roads. Here, two roads are used as a metaphor for two ways of life. The forest is yellow, which means that it is autumn and the trees are shedding their yellow leaves.

As the speaker can’t travel both the roads, he stands there to try to select which path he is going to travel to. However, the poet wants to go down both roads. He is thinking about it hard. He is looking down one road. He tries to see where it goes. The thickness of the woods blocks the view of the speaker. Also, the road is bent in shape and not linear.

The phrase “as just as it is fair” means righteous and equal. This phrase is an example of a simile. The speaker decides to examine the other path because he finds the other road to be less traveled and full of grass

“Wanted wear” is an example of personification. The speaker has personified the grassy road and says that it wanted people to walk on it.

After traveling through the road, the speaker explores that both the roads are equally traveled. At first, the speaker finds the first road to be the more traveled one. Then, he says that both the roads seem equally traveled. The phrase ‘as for that” refers to the road being less worn.

Lines 11-15

Here, the speaker finds that both the paths are looking the same in the morning. After this, he goes in the flashback. It was a tough decision for him to choose the real road because, in the morning, he was the first person who walked on the road. There were no other footsteps. For this reason, he couldn’t decide the right path immediately as no step had left marks on the leaves on the roads to show him the right road. In these lines, the speaker has used imagery.

The poet exclaims that he saves the first passage for another time. He knows that “way leads” to another, and then another. He knows that in this way, one ends up very far from where one has started the journey. The poet here saves the first road for another day. Additionally, the speaker doesn’t think he will ever be able to come back and take the other path to experience it.

Lines 16-20

This stanza shows the speaker’s failure in choosing the right path. The word ‘sigh’ suggests that he will be disappointed with the decision. He accepts that he will be responsible if he fails in taking the right decision. “Ages and ages” is an example of alliteration.

The poet took the road that no one else did and it made the difference in his life that made him unique. One’s individualism matters. Nevertheless, a “difference” may mean success or complete failure.

Mood and tone

It is important to understand the difference between tone and mood. The tone of the poem is how the author of the work feels about it. One can identify it by examining the diction of the work. The diction of the poem is descriptive.

By using words like “diverged,” “sorry,” and “sigh,” the tone of the poem is about longing and meditation. This poem is reflective and thoughtful. The speaker is confused between two options. It is a turning point in the life of the speaker. He has to choose one path and leave behind the other forever.

The speaker is thinking about the pros and cons of the situation. The decision needs a serious approach to consider the outcomes of each choice.  

The mood of the poem is related to the readers and their feelings about the poem. In this way, the mood of the poem is somber and anxious in the beginning but hopeful at the end.

Narrative poem

“The Road Not Taken” is a narrative poem. It has a character, setting, plot, and conflict. The conflict in the poem is the indecisiveness of the persona of the poem.

Point of View

“The Road Not Taken” is narrated from the first-person point of view. The speaker describes his experience by representing himself as “l.” It enables readers to understand the speaker’s feelings and thoughts.

Style, structure, and Rhyme

“The Road Not Taken” consists of four stanzas. Each stanza comprises five lines. The rhyme is strict with the rhyming scheme ABAAB, except for the last line. It is written in iambic tetrameter.

The setting of the poem is “yellow woods.” It is a place where one road is divided into two. The yellow color depicts the autumn season. The road is in a deserted place because there are no other travelers. The speaker standing at the junction sees that one road is gassier than the other.

The speaker of this poem has no name and identity. There is no depiction of the physical appearance of the speaker. It represents the whole of human nature. Human nature wants life to have meaning and purpose. The speaker of the poem is a traveler who comes up with an important decision to make.

The crossroads symbolize the journey of life. It also signifies the destination. People come across decision- making moments that contain equally balanced alternatives. One has to consider the advantages and disadvantages before making a choice.

Literary Devices in the Poem

Alliteration.

Alliteration is the repetition of similar consonant sounds in a series of words at a stressed syllable. In the second stanza, the sound /w/ is repeated in “ w anted w ear.” Similarly, the sound /f/ is repeated in “ f irst f or” in the third stanza.

It is the repetition of identical vowel sounds in successive words. In this poem, assonance contributes to establish the rhyme of the poem and make it easily readable. “L oo ked down one a s f a r a s I c ou ld,” “ a s just a s f a ir,” “it w a s gr a ssy and w a nted we a r,” and “ a ges and a ges” are all examples of assonance. 

Connotation

Connotation means the secondary meaning of the word. The primary meaning of “The Road” is a path that a person travels. Its secondary meaning is of “choice.” The presence of two paths/two choices gives the feeling of indecision to the speaker.

It is the repetition of consonant sounds at the start, middle or end of the words. “Yello w w oods,” “ t o where i t ben t ,” “ th en took the o th er,” “ w anted w ear,” and “kno w ing ho w w ay leads on to w ay” are all the examples of consonance.

This whole poem is an extended metaphor. The two roads act as a metaphor for two choices in life. The thinking of the speaker about the selection of one road is also a metaphor used for thinking before taking a decision.

The yellow color of the woods is also a metaphor. It is compared with the moment when a person has to choose the downfall of his life or when he is getting old.

Personification

Personification means to attribute human qualities to nonhuman things. Personification occurs in the second stanza when the speaker says that the road was grassy and “wanted wear.” By saying that the road has a “better claim,” the speaker states that the road intends to attract travelers.

For most of the poem, the speaker is describing the setting. Visual imagery is used because the speaker is sketching the scenery. He says that the road is yellow which creates a mental image of trees shedding leaves in autumn. The worn-out state of the road also contributes to the meaning of the poem. There is auditory imagery as well by using the word “sigh.”

The irony in the poem is in the idea of multiple significance of the road. They are not simple roads because they have a secondary meaning as well. The speaker of the poem has to take the road of the majority or the road with fewer travelers. The eventual choice of the speaker is also ironic. Both the roads are equally worn out but the speaker still chooses the second. 

More From Robert Frost

• Mending Wall

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.

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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: Poems

By robert frost, robert frost: poems summary and analysis of "the road not taken" (1916).

The narrator comes upon a fork in the road while walking through a yellow wood. He considers both paths and concludes that each one is equally well-traveled and appealing. After choosing one of the roads, the narrator tells himself that he will come back to this fork one day in order to try the other road. However, he realizes that it is unlikely that he will ever have the opportunity to come back to this specific point in time because his choice of path will simply lead to other forks in the road (and other decisions). The narrator ends on a nostalgic note, wondering how different things would have been had he chosen the other path.

This poem is made up of four stanzas of five lines, each with a rhyme scheme of ABAAB.

Along with “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” this poem is one of Frost’s most beloved works and is frequently studied in high school literature classes. Since its publication, many readers have analyzed the poem as a nostalgic commentary on life choices. The narrator decided to seize the day and express himself as an individual by choosing the road that was “less traveled by.” As a result of this decision, the narrator claims, his life was fundamentally different that it would have been had he chosen the more well-traveled path.

This reading of the poem is extremely popular because every reader can empathize with the narrator’s decision: having to choose between two paths without having any knowledge of where each road will lead. Moreover, the narrator’s decision to choose the “less traveled” path demonstrates his courage. Rather than taking the safe path that others have traveled, the narrator prefers to make his own way in the world.

However, when we look closer at the text of the poem, it becomes clear that such an idealistic analysis is largely inaccurate. The narrator only distinguishes the paths from one another after he has already selected one and traveled many years through life. When he first comes upon the fork in the road, the paths are described as being fundamentally identical. In terms of beauty, both paths are equally “fair,” and the overall “…passing there / Had worn them really about the same.”

It is only as an old man that the narrator looks back on his life and decides to place such importance on this particular decision in his life. During the first three stanzas, the narrator shows no sense of remorse for his decision nor any acknowledgement that such a decision might be important to his life. Yet, as an old man, the narrator attempts to give a sense of order to his past and perhaps explain why certain things happened to him. Of course, the excuse that he took the road “less traveled by” is false, but the narrator still clings to this decision as a defining moment of his life, not only because of the path that he chose but because he had to make a choice in the first place.

Robert Frost: Poems Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Robert Frost: Poems is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

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In Frost's poems (particularly after 1914), he focuses on the trouble men and women have within their intimate relationships and examines the reason why many of these relationships have stagnated.

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Discuss the theme of the poem "The Road Not Taken" written by Robert Frost.

The central theme of "The Road Not Taken" revolves around the significance of human choice. Through its tone, language, and structure, the poem is able to offer multiple understandings of what it means to choose. The first interpretation of choice...

Study Guide for Robert Frost: Poems

Robert Frost: Poems study guide contains a biography of poet Robert Frost, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis of his major poems.

• About Robert Frost: Poems
• Robert Frost: Poems Summary
• "Mending Wall" Video
• Character List

Essays for Robert Frost: Poems

Robert Frost: Poems essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Robert Frost's poems.

• Nature Imagery in the Works of Robert Frost
• Robert Frost in England - A Short Biography
• An Explication of Mending Wall By Robert Frost
• The Most of It
• "Eternal Freshness of the Flawless Poem:" Why Frost's Poetry Remains Vital

Lesson Plan for Robert Frost: Poems

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Robert Frost: Poems
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Robert Frost: Poems Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Robert Frost: Poems

• Introduction
• Awards and recognition
• Legacy and cultural influence

The Road Not Taken

38 pages • 1 hour read

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Summary and Study Guide

One of the most recognized and often quoted poems in 20th-century American poetry, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” (1915) celebrates the strength of individuality and the heroic decision to take control of life. The poem offers a simple narrative moment: A man, walking a path in the woods, comes to a fork in the road, and he decides which path to take. Indeed, the poem, with its apparent hyper-serious tone and preachy didacticism , has become a staple in commencement addresses, as it seems to demand turning away from the herd and following the heart’s inclinations despite any misgivings.

The poem, however, is deceptively simple. A major expression of Modernism, in which a generation of daring and uncompromising poets, centered in England, recast the nature of poetry itself through a subtle use of irony that infused their verse with an alarming sense of anxiety and spiritual crisis, the poem resists making heroic the assertion of choice in life and suggests in fact that such dramatic choices really have no consequences. Choice becomes meaningful only in retrospect, a measure of the ability of the mind later to refashion such impulsive decisions into something that passes for wisdom. Take either path, the poem slyly suggests with existential irony, it makes little difference.

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Poet Biography

Although when he died at 88 in 1963, Robert Frost was regarded as America’s most beloved poet and the nation’s unofficial Poet Laureate, the winner of four Pulitzer Prizes and one of the most recognized American writers of the 20th century, Frost struggled to find a publisher for his poetry until he was nearly 40.

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Despite his reputation as the poet of the rugged New England backwoods, Frost was actually born in San Francisco, although he came to Massachusetts when he was 11 when his family moved there after his father, a successful journalist, died. A precocious reader early on, particularly the intricate metrical inventions of Edgar Allan Poe, Frost always knew he would be a poet. He struggled to commit to the discipline of education, attending first Dartmouth College and then briefly Harvard but never finishing a degree. He tried a number of occupations, including shoe repair, journalism, and even working the farm his grandfather bought for him when Frost married. He failed at all of them, and in 1912, desperate to find a publisher for his poetry, he and his wife relocated to Dymock, England, about two hours west of London. There he found welcome company among the Modernists, most notably American expatriate Ezra Pound.

Frost, then in his forties, quickly published two well-received volumes of poetry, and when he returned to the United States in 1915 his work was widely recognized for its lyrical grace, its carefully chiseled lines, and its exploration of the dynamic between humanity and nature. Over the next 20 years, Frost became America’s most prolific and most admired poet. His collections were best sellers, and Frost himself became a celebrity. Frost enjoyed a long teaching career at different universities working with young poets. He gave public readings that became entertainment sensations. With his craggy face and shock of unkempt white hair, Frost became, after Ernest Hemingway, the most recognized writer of his generation, gracing the covers of both Time and Life .

His verse, grounded in traditional notions of careful metrics and strict rhyme ( free verse , he often complained, was like playing tennis without the net), was at once accessible and conversational and yet philosophically profound, even unsettling. Invited by President John F. Kennedy, a fellow New Englander and an avid admirer of Frost’s work, to deliver an original poem at Kennedy’s inauguration in January, 1961, the poet, then 86, could not make out the typed lines of the poem he wrote because of the glare of the sun. Without missing a beat, he recited from memory “The Gift Outright,” a poem he published nearly 50 years earlier. The bravura performance cemented Frost’s international reputation as America’s Poet. Frost continued to write until his death in Boston in January 1963, following a massive heart attack. He was buried by his wife and five of his children in a modest grave in the rustic churchyard of the Old First Church in Bennington, Vermont. His epitaph quotes his own poem “The Lesson for Today”: “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”

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, Robert. “ The Road Not Taken .” 1915. Poetry Foundation.

A nameless hiker of indeterminate age and non-specified gender takes a leisurely morning stroll through a familiar forest, its trees a monochromatic yellow. The hiker suddenly comes to an unexpected fork in the path. This presents an unsettling dilemma, which path to take. The hiker regrets at first that they cannot go down both paths—“Sorry I could not travel both” (Line 2)—a quixotic, and unsettlingly childish response that masks major confusion. He is momentarily paralyzed, a happy walk suddenly morphing into a problem, a thorny choice he must make. Both paths tease, goad, beckon. It is a moment of indecision that quickly becomes for the timid, cautious hiker a titanic predicament. The hiker frets, peering down one path as far as he can see, to “where it bent in the undergrowth” (Line 5), and then peering down the other, trying earnestly to find some reason to choose one path over the other.

His first inclination is to play it safe and head down the more beaten path, the more path-like path. Which path had been used more? Heavier traffic would indicate to his careful logic a safer passage, a more reliable path. As far as the hiker can tell, as far as he can see, however, the paths seem the same, worn exactly the same. They are both green, “grassy,” indicating neither had been used much, that both “wanted wear” (Line 8). Both seem to offer a way that “no step had trodden black” (Line 12). In the morning sun, both paths “equally lay” (Line 11). Neither one is safer than the other, neither more used than the other. The hiker is left back where he started, how to choose? The implications of the decision become unsettling: Either path might offer something he would miss should he decide to take the other path.

The only non-viable alternative is to stand forever fixated; that is, self-inflicted paralysis. The hiker must choose. The decision to follow one path is more impulsive than considered, more about an illogical whim than actual logic or foresight. He moves on to one of the paths, the one that did not bend out of sight, reassuring himself quickly that some other day, later, he can certainly choose the other path. He tries, then, to minimize the implications of the choice. “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” (Line 13). Yet, as he reflects as he moves down his chosen path, such a reboot is unlikely, that life being what it is may never return him to that crossroad, may never give him the chance to follow the other path, to see where it might have led.

In the closing stanza, the hiker takes a step back and congratulates himself on his decision-making prowess. As he gambols down the path, he is proud of his pro-active response to the crisis of a fork in the road. He decides grandly, without a hint of saving irony or self-mockery, that this decision of his will become the stuff of heroic tales, recounted “ages and ages hence” (Line 27). He is certain that he will recall with a “sigh” (Line 16), an ambiguous emotional response, how when confronted by the dilemma of a fork in the road one extraordinarily ordinary morning he chose one way over the other and how that the choice has “made all the difference” (Line 20). He actually anticipates his own bloviating insincerity, how he will later claim boldly that he chose the path “less travelled by” (Line 19), a manifest lie. That choice he himself acknowledged even before he made it was really no choice at all, one path being no better than the other, just different. Only in the looking back will that decision, a product not of calculated deliberation but rather of raw impulse, become a decision that meant everything.

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The Road Not Taken Summary, Analysis and Themes

“The Road Not Taken” is a famous poem by Robert Frost that explores the theme of choices and their consequences. 

The speaker comes across two paths in the woods, symbolizing different directions in life. He chooses the less-traveled path, and this decision is said to have “made all the difference”. However, the poem also carries an ironic tone, suggesting that the importance of our choices may ultimately be exaggerated as both paths could lead to unforeseen outcomes.

A lone hiker is enjoying a leisurely stroll through a familiar forest bathed in autumnal yellow hues. 

However, this peaceful walk is disrupted when they reach an unexpected fork in the path. Torn between two equally appealing paths, the hiker is paralyzed with indecision.

Initially, the hiker’s instinct is to lament their inability to walk both paths. This desire feels childish, highlighting the hiker’s confusion and the weight of the seemingly trivial decision. 

The predicament hangs heavy, transforming a joyful walk into an unexpected crisis.

The hiker desperately tries to find some difference between the two paths, meticulously examining them for any sign that might make the choice easier. Initially drawn to the perceived safety of a more well-trodden trail, they are disappointed to discover that both paths appear equally unused and inviting. 

There seems to be no logical reason to prefer one over the other, leaving the hiker frustrated.

The implications of this simple choice begin to feel profound. 

The hiker fears missing out on something extraordinary by taking one path and forsaking the other. The weight of decision-making feels overwhelming. However, paralysis is not an option – a choice must be made.

In the end, the choice is somewhat impulsive. 

The hiker selects one path – the one that doesn’t disappear into the undergrowth – and immediately tries to reassure themselves that they can always return to the other path someday. 

This reassurance feels weak, and the hiker acknowledges that life might never bring them back to this exact point. The opportunity to explore the other path may be forever lost.

Despite this, the hiker ends on a note of self-aggrandizement. They convince themselves that this choice, born from impulse and chance, will be a pivotal moment in their life. 

With each step down the chosen path, they romanticize the decision. The hiker pictures themselves in the future, dramatically recounting this tale with an air of melancholic wisdom, sighing about the road less traveled and how their choice “made all the difference.”

There’s no evidence that the paths were substantially different. The real drama of the poem lies in the hiker’s internal struggle with choice itself. 

The exaggerated importance they attach to this moment hints at possible feelings of regret or longing. Perhaps it symbolizes the tendency to romanticize the roads we didn’t take, wondering about the life we might have lived had we chosen differently.

Structure and Form

• Meter and Rhyme: Frost employs a fairly regular iambic tetrameter (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM) throughout the poem, with an ABAAB rhyme scheme in each stanza. This creates a sense of rhythm and predictability, however there are variations in the meter that subtly mirror the speaker’s uncertainty and contemplation of his choice.
• Stanzas: The poem contains four stanzas of five lines each, a structure which adds to its measured and thoughtful pace.

Imagery and Symbolism

• The Roads: The central symbol of the poem is, of course, the two diverging roads within a yellow wood. These roads symbolize major life choices; the paths that spread out before us as we make decisions that shape our futures.
• The waning of the year might suggest declining years, with the speaker facing the roads of his life near its end.
• Autumn is a season of transition, hinting at the change brought about by significant life-altering choices.
• Wear and Grass: The speaker notes that one road is perhaps less traveled, “wanting wear,” and is “grassy.” These images can represent the allure of taking a unique, unconventional path while also acknowledging the potential for uncertainty and challenge along this less-trodden route.

Language and Tone

• Diction: Frost’s language is simple and accessible, yet carefully chosen. Words like “diverged,” “undergrowth,” and “sigh” contribute to various moods within the poem.
• Conversational Style: The poem maintains a colloquial feel, mimicking natural speech patterns. This gives an impression of the speaker mulling over a decision, talking to himself as he ponders the choice.
• Ambiguous Tone: The tone of the poem is notoriously complex. On the surface, there’s a note of independence, of taking charge of one’s destiny. However, a deeper reading reveals hints of doubt, melancholy, or even self-justification. The final “sigh” suggests a sense of complexity within the speaker’s feelings about his choices.

The Illusion of Choice and the Weight of Decisions

Robert Frost’s poem dives deep into the complicated nature of decision-making and how we often exaggerate the potential consequences of our choices. The speaker is paralyzed by two seemingly identical paths. 

This indecision suggests that sometimes, the choices presented to us might not hold the monumental differences we imagine. 

The poem hints that life’s journey is more unpredictable than we’d like and that the “path less traveled” might not always be as transformative as we believe. 

Despite the ultimately arbitrary nature of his choice, the speaker imbues it with grand significance, fantasizing about how he will recount the story with a dramatic sigh in years to come.

The Power of Retrospection and Imagined Futures

The poem speaks volumes about how we romanticize the past and rewrite the narratives of our lives. 

The speaker fixates on the notion of the unexplored path, the potential experiences they may be missing. 

In the end, they convince themselves that their impulsive decision held profound importance. This highlights how memory has the power to reshape our understanding of past events. 

The speaker imagines a future self, wistful and wise, looking back at this crossroads as the moment that changed everything. 

The poem suggests that we all tend to engage in this type of self-mythologizing, imagining countless “what-ifs” and painting our choices as more consequential than they perhaps truly were.

The Human Fear of the Unknown

The poem reveals our inherent discomfort with uncertainty. 

The speaker is filled with a childlike anxiety at the fork in the road, wanting to take both paths and lamenting the impossibility of it. The unknown holds both potential and fear, and the speaker’s struggle highlights this fundamental human tension. 

When faced with choices, we crave certainty and often prefer the familiar over the untrodden path, even when the familiar offers no inherent advantage. 

This highlights a desire for control over an ultimately uncontrollable path of life.

The Necessity of Action

Despite its exploration of doubt, the poem also emphasizes the inevitable need to move forward. 

The speaker cannot stand paralyzed at the fork forever; they must choose a direction. This reflects the reality of life, which often doesn’t allow for endless deliberation. 

We are constantly forced to make choices, sometimes blindly, and to keep moving even when unsure about the consequences. 

While the speaker romanticizes the road not taken, they ultimately accept the necessity of forward motion, a testament to the human capacity to grapple with the unknown and forge a path nonetheless.

Final Thoughts

The true heart of the poem lies less in the act of choosing and more in our human tendency to romanticize the past and rewrite our own narratives. 

Frost masterfully plays with a speaker who seems initially confused, then impulsive, and finally self-aggrandizing. It hints that the ‘roads’ we don’t choose may hold more power in our imagination than in reality. 

The poem leaves us pondering the weight we assign to our decisions, and whether the imagined futures of paths untaken ultimately hold more sway than the path we actually walk.

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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.

Ashley Sufflé Robinson has a Ph.D. in 19th Century English Literature. As a content writer for PrepScholar, Ashley is passionate about giving college-bound students the in-depth information they need to get into the school of their dreams.

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• CBSE Notes For Class 9
• Class 9 English Notes and Summary
• The Road Not Taken Summary

The Road Not Taken Poem Summary and Notes | CBSE Class 9 English Beehive

Summary of the road not taken.

Chapter 1 of the CBSE Class 9 English book ‘Beehive’ has a poem named The Road Not Taken . The poem is written by the American poet Robert Frost. He writes about common, ordinary experiences in a simple but insightful way. Here, we have provided a detailed description of the poem, along with a summary. Students can go through the CBSE Class 9 English Beehive notes to get an insight into the poem and understand it in a better way. The summary will provide a brief overview of the poem.

Students can also know how to write an effective essay during the exam by going through the  essays at BYJU’S to increase their marks in Class 9 English exam.

CBSE Class 9 English Beehive The Road Not Taken Poem Summary

The Road Not Taken is a well-known poem about making choices in our lives. The choices we make shape us. In the poem, the road symbolizes our life, and the path that we don’t choose is “the road not taken”. The poet describes his life experience and says that long ago, he had two choices to make. He had chosen one and moved ahead with it. Now, if he wants to make another choice, he can’t do so. The message the poet wants to convey is that the choices we make significantly impact our future. If we make the wrong choice, then we can’t go back and correct it. We will have no option other than regretting it. So, we should be wise while making decisions or choices in our life.

CBSE Class 9 English Beehive The Road Not Taken Poem Explanation Notes

Below, students can have a look at the poem and its explanation in detail.

The Road Not Taken Poem and Explanation

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveller, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, 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 travelled by,

And that has made all the difference.

By ROBERT FROST

The poet was walking down the road when he found a diversion where two roads diverged in different directions. The poet felt sorry that he could not travel on both roads. He had to make one decision and choose a single path. At the junction, the poet stood for a long time and tried to look at the roads as far as he could. He wanted to see the roads in full and wanted to know about both paths. But, he could not see anything beyond the diversion as the roads were curved and covered with trees. In the stanza, the yellow wood refers to the forest with leaves which were shed on the road and had turned yellow. This indicates that it was the autumn season. Through this stanza, the poet wants to convey that in everyone’s life, there comes a time when we have to make choices. We have alternatives, but we have to choose only one. At that time, we see the pros and cons of the situation and take the time to decide which path to take. Similarly, the poet is also taking time before making any decision.

After pondering on it for a long time, the poet decided to take the other road. He felt that both roads were equally good. He started walking on the road which had grass on it and felt that it was a better road for him. The grassy road means that the road was not used, and the wanted wear means that only a few people have walked through it. After walking some distance on the road, the poet felt that both paths were almost the same. There was hardly any difference between them. Through this, the poet conveys that, in our life, whatever decisions we take or choices we make, each choice has some advantages and some disadvantages. Problems are everywhere, so we must be ready to face them.

The poet says that both paths seemed to be similar that morning. Leaves were shed on both roads, and they were still green. It means that no one had walked on the roads. He decided to take one path that day and the other path on another day. However, he knows that one way leads to another way. He could not go back and take the other path once he moved ahead with one. Similarly, in our life, when we make one decision, we can’t go back. We have to move ahead with the same choice and face the consequences which come our way.

The poet says that in the future, he will take a deep breath and say that once upon a time, he reached a point in life where he had to make one choice. There were two options for him, and he had to opt for one. At that time, he decided to take that road which was less travelled by people. It means that he took a decision which rare people take. And that decision has changed his entire life. Through the poem, the poet sends a powerful message that people should decide wisely in their life because the decision they take will have an impact on the rest of their life.

We hope students have found the summary and explanation of CBSE Class 9 English Beehive The Road Not Taken Poem useful for their studies. They can also access essays on different topics, such as Essay on Republic Day and Essay on the Constitution of India . By going through these essays, students will get an idea of how to write a good essay for the exam.

Frequently Asked Questions on CBSE Class 9 English: The Road Not Taken

Who is the poet of the poem ‘the road not taken’.

Robert Frost is the poet of this poem.

Why is it important to make the right choices in life?

The choices we make in our lives should be thought about carefully. One should be aware and ready to face the consequences of each decision he/she takes.

Whom should one consult for advice?

One should be very cautious while discussing decisions with anyone. It is advisable to consult and seek help only from very close ones which include parents.

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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.

Meanings of The Road Not Taken

The poem “The Road Not Taken” defines human beings as having choices in life to make a difference in the world. The poet presents this main idea through his own choice of a road less traveled.

Meaning of Stanza -1

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;

This stanza presents the main situation the poet’s faces. The context is of “a yellow wood” where the poet feels sorry that there are two roads and he has a choice to travel on one of them. The reason is he is a single person and not a double. Therefore, he needs to travel only once after looking at one of them that it is less traveled and that it shows undergrowth which means very few people have traveled through it. The stanza contributes to the main idea of choice in one’s life by presenting two roads, their contexts, and situations.

Meaning of Stanza -2

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,

This stanza presents the situation of the poem. Frost states that he took one of them and thought that in the future, he would claim that it was a fair choice. He would support his claim that it was grassy and that it wanted to wear, the reason that he chose that road. However, then he would look back in retrospect and see that both have the same prospects as both were equally worn. Therefore, the poet has made a good choice by choosing one of them after assessing their value. The stanza contributes to the main idea of the choice by showing that both choices seem to have equal value.

Meaning of Stanza -3

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.

The poet presented the situation when he chose one of the roads. He states that both are equally worn out on that morning when he chose one. He sees that nobody has stepped upon the leaves on that day on those two roads. The poet states that he thought to keep one road for some other day to travel, but he knows at heart that one way leads to another and then to another, and this circular style continues. The poet feels doubts that he would ever be able to come back if he chooses one. The stanza contributes to the procedure of making a choice by presenting that this one step is significant in that it does not make a person able to return and make another choice in life.

Meaning of Stanza -4

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.

The poet turns to the future. He thinks that when in the future somebody would inquire about this choice, he would heave a sigh and state that sometime in the distant past, he made a choice of one road out of the two diverging in the yellow wood. He would state that he chose one of them, which was not traveled much, and this non-worn-out state of the road has made a difference for him. This stanza contributes to the overall idea of the poem as how a choice made in life makes a difference.

Summary of The Road Not Taken

• Popularity: This poem was Written by Robert Frost and was published in 1961 as the first poem in the collection Mountain Interval . The poem, having a perfect rhyme scheme , ‘ABAAB’ is an ambiguous poem that allows the readers to think about choices they make in life. Robert Frost wrote this poem for his friend Edward Thomas, as a joke. He considers it a very tricky poem.
• The Road Not Taken as Nostalgic Commentary on Life Choices : This poem is about life from the perspective of a young narrator who decides to seize the day, and, as an individual, chooses the road “less traveled by .” The expression of doubt runs in the poem from the first line until the last. The expression of uncertainty about choices and our natural tendency to surmise about consequences we may have to face marks the central point of the poem. However, what stays in the mind of the people is the philosophy of life and the dilemma of making choices.
• Major Themes of the Poem : The poem comprises uncertainty and perplexing situation of the minds of people about what they may face when standing on the verge of making choices. It is because life is full of choices, and the choices we make, define the whole course of our lives. Similarly, the narrator faces a situation during his travel. He finds two roads at a point where he has to choose one and must abide by his choice. He thinks he may come back one day to travel on the other road. However, he also has a feeling that his choice will confront him with new adventures and challenges. Though there is some regret over his choice, he realizes that the things he has encountered and the places he has visited, because of this path, have made all the difference in his life.

Analysis of Literary Devices in The Road Not Taken

The analysis of literary devices explains the hidden meanings of a literary text or a poem. The use of literary devices is intended to bring richness and clarity to the text with different meanings. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost is also filled with important undertones with the following literary devices.

• Metaphor : There are many metaphors in the poem, like road, fork in the road and yellowwoods. The road in the poem is the metaphor for life, while the fork on the road metaphorically represents the choices we make to determine the course of our lives. Similarly, yellow woods are the metaphor of making decisions during the hard times of a person’s life. These metaphors used in this poem emphasize the importance of the different decisions we make in different situations and their impacts on our lives.
• Imagery : Imagery is used to make the readers feel things through their five senses. The poet has used images of the sense of sights, such as leaves and yellowwoods. These images help readers actually to perceive things they are reading. The image of the road helps readers to visualize the road providing a navigation route to the traveler.
• Simile : A simile is a device used to compare things with familiar things to let the readers know it easily. There is one simile used in the second stanza as “as just as fair”. It shows how the poet has linked the road less taken to the easy way through life.
• Assonance : Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds, such as the sound of /a/ and /o/ in quick succession in “though as far that the passing” and in “Somewhere ages and ages hence.”
• Consonance : Consonance is the repetition of consonant sounds such as /d/ in “two roads diverging in a yellow wood” and /t/ sound in “though as far as the passing there.”
• Personification : Robert Frost personified the road in the third line of the second stanza. Here, it is stated “Because it was grassy and wanted wear” as if the road is human and that it wants to wear and tear.
• Parallelism : Parallelism is the use of a source of words, phrases , or sentences that have similar grammatical forms. Frost has used Parallelism in the poem such as;

“And sorry I could not travel both” “And be only one traveler long I stood” “And looked down once as far as I could”

Analysis of Poetic Devices in “The Road Not Taken”

Although most of the poetic devices are part of literary devices, some devices are only used in poems. An analysis of some of the major poetic devices used in this poem is given here.

• Stanza : A stanza is a poetic form of a fixed number of lines. In this poem, there are four stanzas, with each stanza having five verses or lines.
• Quintain: A quintain is a five-lined stanza borrowed from Medieval French Poetry. Here, each stanza is a quintain, such as the first one or the second one.
• Rhyme Scheme : The whole poem follows the ABAAB rhyme scheme. There are four beats per line, employing iambic tetrameter. The rhymes in “The Road Not Taken” are end rhymes which are also perfect rhymes.
• Trochee: Trochee means there is one stressed and one unstressed syllable in a line, such as “Two roads di verged in a yell ow wood .”
• Anapests : Anapests means there are two short or unstressed syllables followed by one long or stressed syllable. The above example is also an anapest .

 Quotations for Usage from The Road Not Taken

 1.  The two lines given below can be quoted during a speech when remembering a hard time of one’s life.

“I shall be telling this with a sigh / somewhere ages and ages hence.”

2. These two lines could be used when delivering lectures or speeches about decision-making choices in life such as:

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

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The Road not Taken Poem Analysis

This essay will provide an analysis of Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken.” It will discuss the poem’s themes of choice, individualism, and the interpretation of life decisions. The piece will explore Frost’s use of metaphor and imagery, and the poem’s enduring significance in American literature. On PapersOwl, there’s also a selection of free essay templates associated with Analysis.

How it works

“The Road not taken is a poem written in 1916 by Robert Frost and was the first poem of the collection Mountain interval. The poem is the story of a traveler, who is located into the intersection of two diverged roads and must choose one to continue his way, as he hesitates to take one or other to finally make his choice. Robert Frost uses imagery, metaphor, and personification to describe the difficulties facing in making decisions and where choices can lead in life.

Imagery is the most remarkable device in this poem because the narrator stands to describe the site of the occurring. “two roads diverged in a wood” means that the event happens in a quiet forest. “bent in the undergrowth” signifies that the roads are curvy and there is point where the view of the traveler gets loose on the horizon. Another part of the setting is when Frost mentions “yellow wood” which clarifies that the scene happens on a sunny day of fall. Imagery, in this poem is effective because the ones who has read it, can immediately start thinking about the place.

Metaphor has an important role in this poem since it has many of it and it gives the poem a deep meaning. In a metaphoric signification traveler means a person living because life is a travel. The “diverged roads” symbolizes that, in life there are many choices or decisions we living to, either take one or the other. “yellow woods” represents the struggles people go through their lives. During those times, the choices made are often critical. Frost uses the metaphors in this poem, to make a point on the value of different choices a person makes in different case and their effects on his life.

Another poetic device used by Frost is the personification. Personification, in the road not taken defines which character that decisions can play in life. “Because it was grassy and wanted” is the reason of the traveler choice. Frost wants the readers to understand that sometimes people make choices based on the looking without further evaluation. According to Frost, choices like that, are often the worst. The translation of this poem to real life is that, appearance is a trap in the sense that things appear to shine, but they are no longer shine after you make the choice and lead to a fail.

The road not taken by one of the most beloved poets, Robert Frost, is a poem that tell the struggles of a traveler of choosing his way in the wood, but has a deep meaning as the author uses figure of speech like the metaphor and the personification. This poem gives the readers moral lessons about choices, they are hard times moments and need to take carefully with consideration. Choices based on the looking are not the best, they are the causes of the fallings. Choices are crucial, because life is choices.”

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Analysis of "The Road not Taken"

• Categories: Art History Poetry

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Published: Mar 16, 2024

Words: 621 | Page: 1 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Language and imagery, structure and form, themes and interpretations.

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Christopher spaide, more online by christopher spaide.

• “Nihilism, Shmihilism”
• The Trembling Answers

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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The Road Not Taken Essay

Works cited.

Robert Frost was an avid poet who lived in America between during the twentieth century. His poem “The Road Not Taken” is still one of his best works. Frost’s exceptional depictions of America’s rural life along with his mastery of colloquial speech, makes him one of the best poets of the twentieth century (Dickinson et al. 16).

In most of his works, the rural New England’s setting is used as a tool for examining philosophical and sociological themes. His work made him an American literature heavy weight managing to win him several Pulitzer prizes in the process. Frost’s stature in Poetry can only be compared to that of other notable figures like Eliot and Stevens.

In this poem, the speaker has come upon a diversion in a path in the woods. In the woods, the leaves’ color is already turning. It is in this fork that the speaker contemplates on which road to follow. The main problem is that the speaker cannot follow both paths. After examining one of the paths as far as he/she can see, he/she decides to take the other.

In the speaker’s mind, the path he /she takes is less worn out. However, the truth is that both paths are almost the same. Near the end, the speaker reflects on how he plans to try the road he/ she did not take. Nevertheless, the chances of doing this according to the speaker are very minimal.

In “The Road Not Taken”, the poet uses a reflective tone to address the significance of the choices one makes in life. In this poem, Symbolism is the tool used to bring about this reflection. The “road” referred to by the speaker is the most prominent symbol in the poem. In this case, the road refers to a path in life.

The poem addresses universal themes that are easy to relate to. In turn, this increases the poem’s audience. The poet also employs devices such as rhythms and rhymes. These make the poem easy to read and synthesize. In the end, the speaker uses a nostalgic tone when pondering on what lay on the path he/she did not take.

This poem has four stanzas. Each of the four stanzas has five lines. These five lines have a rhyme scheme of ABAAB. The poem is in the form of a narrative. Each of the lines in the poem has nine syllables. “The Road Not Taken” is one of the most popular poems by Robert Frost. Sometimes the title of this poem is mistaken for “The Road Less Travelled”. Over the years, the poem has been studied in high schools around the country.

Most analyzers classify “The Road Not Taken” as a nostalgic interpretation of personal choices. The narrator decided to use the path that is “less travelled” instead of the more popular one. The narrator also acknowledges that his/her life would have been fundamentally different if his/her choice was different. In the narrator’s view, the road not taken was more popular than the one he/she took.

Most readers find this poem easy to relate to as it is easy for them to empathize with the narrator. This is because almost everyone has been in a situation where he/she had to choose between two options. Like the narrator, in most cases one cannot see beyond the “bend in the undergrowth”. Without this knowledge of where the path would lead, the only consolation is to have faith that one made the right choice.

The narrator’s decision to follow the less popular path shows bravery. Most readers would like to possess such bravery when making life-choices. For instance, most people are in the habit of going with the more popular decisions when put in the narrator’s position. The narrator chooses to take a less safe path in the hope that those who come after him/her can emulate this.

A closer analysis of the poem reveals that the narrator’s hypothesis is somehow inaccurate. The narrator is talking about these two possible paths years after making his/her choice. For instance, when the narrator reaches the diversion point, both paths are described as being “equally fair”.

It seems that even the narrator cannot conclusively declare that one path is better than the other is. The narrator uses the term “perhaps” in justifying this choice. When the narrator is justifying his/her choice, old age has already come. Therefore, in the narrator’s admission it is impossible to find out which of these two choices is the better one.

In the first three stanzas, there is no sense of remorse in the narrator’s voice. The narrator is very confident with his/her decision (Shan 116). In addition, the narrator does not admit to the importance of this decision in his/her life. It is only later that the narrator tries to organize the events of his/her life in a manner that makes sense to both the narrator and the audience.

The need to justify this choice is perhaps a way of addressing questions pertaining to the outcome of the narrator’s life. In the end, the narrator sticks to the belief that the path taken was the less popular one. This is in a bid to let the audience know that making this choice was inevitable.

The narrator’s alludes to the fact that he/she had to make his/her choice in the morning. In the third stanza, the narrator acknowledges that he/she was at the path in the morning, and not many people had used the path at the time. This means two things, the first is that this choice was being made early in life, and the second is that there were no many examples to be followed.

These two claims successfully alert the reader about the complexity of the narrator’s situation. Most people can also relate to this by remembering the decisions they made when they were younger. This makes it easier to sympathize with the narrator. The fact that the narrator lacked a choice he/she could emulate makes the situation even more complex. This is because in such scenarios most people use other people’s experiences when making their minds.

Life is full of choices. Even the seemingly inconsequential choices can impact one’s life in a big way. This statement surrounds the poem’s main theme and message. The title of the poem is “The Road Not Taken.” Still, the poem explores the other option or the road that was taken.

Using rhymes and rhythm, the poet conveys his message skillfully. The basic argument is that even though one may be faced with difficult choices in life, one eventually has to pick a path and stick to it. The only thing one can do is to believe that the path he/she took was the right path.

Dickinson, Emily, et al. Four Major American Poets . Upper Saddle, NJ: Pearson Education, 2010. Print.

Shan, Liu. “A Poem of Exotic Tragic Beauty- Appreciation of The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.” Science & Technology Information 19.1 (2007): 116-117. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2018, December 11). The Road Not Taken. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-road-not-taken/

"The Road Not Taken." IvyPanda , 11 Dec. 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/the-road-not-taken/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'The Road Not Taken'. 11 December.

IvyPanda . 2018. "The Road Not Taken." December 11, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-road-not-taken/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Road Not Taken." December 11, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-road-not-taken/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Road Not Taken." December 11, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/the-road-not-taken/.

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