2 THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

                       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.

HISTORY

Frost spent the years 1912 to 1915 in England, where among his acquaintances was the writer Edward Thomas. Thomas and Frost became close friends and took many walks together. After Frost returned to New Hampshire in 1915, he sent Thomas an advance copy of "The Road Not Taken."[1] The poem was intended by Frost as a gentle mocking of indecision, particularly the indecision that Thomas had shown on their many walks together. Frost later expressed chagrin that most audiences took the poem more seriously than he had intended; in particular, Thomas took it seriously and personally, and it may have been the last straw in Thomas' decision to enlist in World War I.[1] Thomas was killed two years later in the Battle of Arras.

ANALYSIS

"The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem consisting of four stanzas of 5 lines each in iambic tetrameter (though it is hypermetricby one beat – there are nine syllables per line instead of the strict eight required for tetrameter) and is one of Frost's most popular works. Besides being among the best known poems, some claim that it is one of the most misunderstood.[2]

Frost's biographer Lawrance Thompson is cited as saying that the poem's narrator is "one who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice made: belatedly but wistfully he sighs over the attractive alternative rejected."[3] According to the Thompson biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (1971), in his introduction in readings to the public, Frost would say that the speaker was based on his friend Edward Thomas. In Frost’s words, Thomas was “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other.[4]

While a case could be made for the sigh being one of satisfaction, the critical 'regret' analysis supports the interpretation that this poem is about the human tendency to look back and attribute blame to minor events in one's life, or to attribute more meaning to things than they may deserve.[5] In 1961, Frost commented that “The Road Not Taken” is “a tricky poem, very tricky” implying that people generally misinterpret this poem as evidence of the benefit of free thinking and not following the crowd, while Frost’s intention was to comment about indecision and people finding meaning in inconsequential decisions.[6] A New York Times Sunday book review on Brian Hall's 2008 biography Fall of Frost states: "Whichever way they go, they’re sure to miss something good on the other path.

Context

When an artist becomes so popular that hoi polloi celebrate him and politicians reward him, critics and avant-gardes do their best to dismiss him. But Frost was that rarest of rare things: a poet who was very, very popular—superstar popular—and, at his best, very, very good. His popularity is unmatched in the annals of American poetry; by the end of his life he had achieved the iconic status of living legend. His collected poems exceeded record sales; he appeared on magazine covers, was asked by President Kennedy to compose an inaugural poem, was sent to Russia on a mission of goodwill by the U.S. government, was recognized on the street and in restaurants. He almost single-handedly created the poetry reading circuit, delighting the public all over the country with engaging presentations of his work. He was perhaps the first poet-in-residence at an American university, in which capacity his duty was little more than to live and exude poetry.

Frost is a poet who often seems liked for the wrong reasons—a poet who is read much but often not very carefully. The subtle wit of his language, his broad humor, and his frequent despair are too often overlooked for his regional-ness, his folksiness, and his public persona. The neglect of his true talents was compounded by the fact that serious criticism for so long did its best to ignore him. However, regardless of who reads him and for what reasons, what really matters are the poems; they stand alone by virtue of their own strength, independent of the associations surrounding them: Though perhaps influenced by, or in agreement with, statements by Imagists, Frost nonetheless belonged to no school; he worked outside of movements and manifestos to create his own sizeable niche in English literature. In the years covered by this SparkNote we find Frost reaching toward, and finally achieving, a mastery of his art.

Robert Frost is considered the quintessential New England poet, but he spent the first eleven years of his life in San Francisco. Only upon the death of Frost’s father did the family go to live with relatives in Lawrence, Massachusetts. There, Frost excelled in high school and fell in love with his co-valedictorian at Lawrence High, Elinor White. They became engaged; Elinor went off to college at St. Lawrence in upstate New York while Frost entered Dartmouth. He was not happy there, however, and left after one semester. Back home, Frost worked as a reporter on a local newspaper and taught school (in part, to help his mother, a teacher with poor control over her students). Frost and Elinor married in 1896, the same year their son Elliott was born. In 1897, Frost matriculated at Harvard University, where he excelled in the Classics. However, the financial and emotional pressures of having a wife, infant, and another child on the way, forced Frost to withdraw after three semesters.

The Frosts moved to a rented farm near Methuen, Massachusetts, and began raising poultry. Tragedy struck in 1900 when three-year-old Elliott died. The family bought a farm in Derry, not far from Lawrence, and Frost settled in to farm, read, write, and raise a family. Three more children were born healthy before the Frosts lost another child in infancy in 1907. In 1906, Frost began teaching at the nearby Pinkerton Academy, where he proved an unconventional and popular instructor. In1912, frustrated at his lack of success in the American poetry world, Frost moved his family to England. They remained there through 1915. In that time he met and befriended many of his British contemporaries, both of major and minor reputation, as well as the American ex-patriot wunderkind Ezra Pound. In 1913, Frost found a London publisher for his A Boy’s Will, and North of Boston appeared in 1914. When the Frosts returned to New England in 1915, both books appeared in the United States—North of Boston to much acclaim. The move to England had proved successful. Frost was suddenly well known in American poetry circles. He would soon be well known everywhere.

Mountain Interval appeared in 1916. Frost began teaching at Amherst College in1917, then served as Poet-in-Residence at the University of Michigan. He would later return to Amherst, then to Michigan, then again to Amherst. He also taught at Harvard and Dartmouth but maintained the longest associations with Amherst and the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College. His Selected Poems andNew Hampshire were published in 1923. New Hampshire garnered Frost the first of his unmatched four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry. West-Running Brook was published in1928, followed by Frost’s Collected Poems in 1930 (Pulitzer #2), A Further Range in1936 (Pulitzer #3), A Witness Tree in 1942 (Pulitzer #4), A Masque of Reason in 1945,Steeple Bush and A Masque of Mercy in 1947, another Complete Poems in 1949, andIn the Clearing in 1962.

Frost’s crowning public moment was his recitation of “The Gift Outright” at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in January of 1960. He died on January 29, 1963.

Summary

To refer to a group of Frost’s poems as “early” is perhaps problematic: One is tempted to think of the term as relative given that Frost’s first book of poetry appeared when he was already 39. Moreover, Frost’s pattern of withholding poems from publication for long periods of time makes dating his work difficult. Many of the poems of the first book, A Boy’s Will, were, in fact, written long before—a few more than a decade earlier. Likewise, Frost’s later books contain poems almost certainly written in the period discussed in this note. The “Early Poems” considered here are a selection of well known verses published in the eleven years (1913-1923) spanned by Frost’s first four books: A Boy’s Will, North of Boston, Mountain Interval,and New Hampshire.

Frost famously likened the composition of free-verse poetry to playing tennis without a net: it might be fun, but it “ain’t tennis.” You will find only tennis in the poems that follow. And yet, even while Frost worked within form, he also worked the form itself, shaping it by his choice of language and his use of variation. He invented forms, too, when the poem required it. A theme in Frost’s work is the need for some, but not total, freedom—for boundaries, too, can be liberating for the poet, and Frost perhaps knew this better than anyone: No American poet has wrought such memorable, personally identifiable, idiosyncratic poetry from such self-imposed, often traditional formulae.

In these “early” years, Frost was concerned with perfecting what he termed “the sound of sense.” This was “the abstract vitality of our speech...pure sound— pure form”: a rendering, in words, of raw sensory perception. The words, the form of the words, and the sounds they encode are as much the subject of the poem as the subject is. Frost once wrote in a letter that to be a poet, one must “learn to get cadences by skillfully breaking the sounds of sense with all their irregularity of accent across the regular beat of the metre.” Thus, we read “Mowing” and simultaneously hear the swishing and whispering of the scythe; upon reading “Stopping by the Woods,” one clearly hears the sweep of easy wind and downy flake; to read “Birches” is to vividly sense the breezy stir that cracks and crazes the trees’ enamel.

Most of the lyrics treated in this note are relatively short, but Frost also pioneered the long dramatic lyric (represented here by “Home Burial”). These works depict spirited characters of a common, localized stripe: New England farm families, hired men, and backwoods curious characters. The shorter poems are often, understandably, more vague in their characterization, but their settings are no less vivid. Moreover, they integrate form and content to stunning effect.

Frost’s prose output was slight; however, he did manage, in essays such as “The Figure a Poem Makes,” to craft several enduring aphorisms about poetry. In regard to the figure of a poem, or that of a line itself, he wrote: “We enjoy the straight crookedness of a good walking stick.” A poem, he wrote, aims for “a momentary stay against confusion.” It “begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting.” He claimed that the highest goal of the poet—and it was a goal he certainly achieved—is “to lodge a few poems where they will be hard to get rid of.”

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Youth and the Loss of Innocence

Youth appears prominently in Frost’s poetry, particularly in connection with innocence and its loss. A Boy’s Will deals with this theme explicitly, tracing the development of a solitary youth as he explores and questions the world around him. Frost’s later work depicts youth as an idealized, edenic state full of possibility and opportunity. But as his poetic tone became increasingly jaded and didactic, he imagines youth as a time of unchecked freedom that is taken for granted and then lost. The theme of lost innocence becomes particularly poignant for Frost after the horrors of World War I and World War II, in which he witnessed the physical and psychic wounding of entire generations of young people. Later poems, including “Birches” (1916), “Acquainted with the Night” (1928), and “Desert Places” (1936), explore the realities of aging and loss, contrasting adult experiences with the carefree pleasures of youth.

Self-Knowledge Through Nature

Nature figures prominently in Frost’s poetry, and his poems usually include a moment of interaction or encounter between a human speaker and a natural subject or phenomenon. These encounters culminate in profound realizations or revelations, which have significant consequences for the speakers. Actively engaging with nature—whether through manual labor or exploration—has a variety of results, including self-knowledge, deeper understanding of the human condition, and increased insight into the metaphysical world. Frost’s earlier work focuses on the act of discovery and demonstrates how being engaged with nature leads to growth and knowledge. For instance, a day of harvesting fruit leads to a new understanding of life’s final sleep, or death, in “After Apple-Picking” (1915). Mid-career, however, Frost used encounters in nature to comment on the human condition. In his later works, experiencing nature provided access to the universal, the supernatural, and the divine, even as the poems themselves became increasingly focused on aging and mortality.

Throughout Frost’s work, speakers learn about themselves by exploring nature, but nature always stays indifferent to the human world. In other words, people learn from nature because nature allows people to gain knowledge about themselves and because nature requires people to reach for new insights, but nature itself does not provide answers. Frost believed in the capacity of humans to achieve feats of understanding in natural settings, but he also believed that nature was unconcerned with either human achievement or human misery. Indeed, in Frost’s work, nature could be both generous and malicious. The speaker of “Design” (1936), for example, wonders about the “design of darkness” (13) that has led a spider to kill a moth over the course of a night. While humans might learn about themselves through nature, nature and its ways remain mysterious.

Community vs. Isolation

Frost marveled at the contrast between the human capacity to connect with one another and to experience feelings of profound isolation. In several Frost poems, solitary individuals wander through a natural setting and encounter another individual, an object, or an animal. These encounters stimulate moments of revelation in which the speaker realizes her or his connection to others or, conversely, the ways that she or he feels isolated from the community. Earlier poems feature speakers who actively choose solitude and isolation in order to learn more about themselves, but these speakers ultimately discover a firm connection to the world around them, as in “The Tufts of Flowers” (1915) and “Mending Wall” (1915). Longer dramatic poems explore how people isolate themselves even within social contexts. Later poems return the focus to solitude, exploring how encounters and community only heighten loneliness and isolation. This deeply pessimistic, almost misanthropic perspective sneaks into the most cheerful of late Frost poems, including “Acquainted with the Night” and “Desert Places.”

Motifs

Manual Labor

Labor functions as a tool for self-analysis and discovery in Frost’s poetry. Work allows his speakers to understand themselves and the world around them. Traditionally, pastoral and romantic poets emphasized a passive relationship with nature, wherein people would achieve understanding and knowledge by observing and meditating, not by directly interacting with the natural world. In contrast, Frost’s speakers work, labor, and act—mending fences, as in “Mending Wall”; harvesting fruit, as in “After Apple-Picking”; or cutting hay, as in “Mowing” (1915). Even children work, although the hard labor of the little boy in “Out, Out—” (1920) leads to his death. The boy’s death implies that while work was necessary for adults, children should be exempted from difficult labor until they have attained the required maturity with which to handle both the physical and the mental stress that goes along with rural life. Frost implies that a connection with the earth and with one’s self can only be achieved by actively communing with the natural world through work.

New England

Long considered the quintessential regional poet, Frost uses New England as a recurring setting throughout his work. Although he spent his early life in California, Frost moved to the East Coast in his early teens and spent the majority of his adult life in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The region’s landscape, history, culture, and attitudes fill his poetry, and he emphasizes local color and natural elements of the forests, orchards, fields, and small towns. His speakers wander through dense woods and snowstorms, pick apples, and climb mountains. North of Boston, the title of Frost’s second collection of poetry, firmly established him as the chronicler of small-town, rural life in New England. Frost found inspiration in his day-to-day experiences, basing “Mending Wall,” for instance, on a fence near his farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and “The Oven Bird” (1920) on birds indigenous to the nearby woods.

The Sound of Sense

Frost coined the phrase thesound of sense to emphasize the poetic diction, or word choice, used throughout his work. According to letters he wrote in 1913 and 1914, the sound of sense should be positive, as well as proactive, and should resemble everyday speech. To achieve the sound of sense, Frost chose words for tone and sound, in addition to considering each word’s meaning. Many poems replicate content through rhyme, meter, and alliteration. For instance, “Mowing” captures the back-and-forth sound of a scythe swinging, while “Out, Out—” imitates the jerky, noisy roar of a buzz saw. Believing that poetry should be recited, rather than read, Frost not only paid attention to the sound of his poems but also went on speaking tours throughout the United States, where he would read, comment, and discuss his work. Storytelling has a long history in the United States, particularly in New England, and Frost wanted to tap into this history to emphasize poetry as an oral art.

Symbols

Trees

Trees delineate borders in Frost’s poetry. They not only mark boundaries on earth, such as that between a pasture and a forest, but also boundaries between earth and heaven. In some poems, such as “After Apple-Picking” and “Birches,” trees are the link between earth, or humanity, and the sky, or the divine. Trees function as boundary spaces, where moments of connection or revelation become possible. Humans can observe and think critically about humanity and the divine under the shade of these trees or standing nearby, inside the trees’ boundary space. Forests and edges of forests function similarly as boundary spaces, as in “Into My Own” (1915) or “Desert Places.” Finally, trees acts as boundaries or borders between different areas or types of experiences. When Frost’s speakers and subjects are near the edge of a forest, wandering in a forest, or climbing a tree, they exist in liminal spaces, halfway between the earth and the sky, which allow the speakers to engage with nature and experience moments of revelation.

Birds and Birdsong

In Frost’s poetry, birds represent nature, and their songs represent nature’s attitudes toward humanity. Birds provide a voice for the natural world to communicate with humans. But their songs communicate only nature’s indifference toward the human world, as in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” (1923) and “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” (1942). Their beautiful melodies belie an absence of feeling for humanity and our situations. Nevertheless, as a part of nature, birds have a right to their song, even if it annoys or distresses human listeners. In “A Minor Bird” (1928), the speaker eventually realizes that all songs must continue to exist, whether those songs are found in nature, as with birds, or in culture, as with poems. Frost also uses birds and birdsong to symbolize poetry, and birds become a medium through which to comment on the efficacy of poetry as a tool of emotional expression, as in “The Oven Bird” (1920).

Solitary Travelers

Solitary travelers appear frequently in Frost’s poems, and their attitudes toward their journeys and their surroundings highlight poetic and historical themes, including the figure of the wanderer and the changing social landscape of New England in the twentieth century. As in romanticism, a literary movement active in England from roughly 1750 to 1830, Frost’s poetry demonstrates great respect for the social outcast, or wanderer, who exists on the fringes of a community. Like the romanticized notion of the solitary traveler, the poet was also separated from the community, which allowed him to view social interactions, as well as the natural world, with a sense of wonder, fear, and admiration. Able to engage with his surroundings using fresh eyes, the solitary traveler simultaneously exists as a part of the landscape and as an observer of the landscape. Found in “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923), “Into My Own,” “Acquainted with the Night,” and “The Road Not Taken” (1920), among other poems, the solitary traveler demonstrates the historical and regional context of Frost’s poetry. In the early twentieth century, the development of transportation and industry created the social type of the wandering “tramp,” who lived a transient lifestyle, looking for work in a rapidly developing industrial society. Like Frost’s speakers and subjects, these people lived on the outskirts of the community, largely away from the warmth and complexity of human interaction.

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, where his father, William Prescott Frost Jr., and his mother, Isabelle Moodie, had moved from Pennsylvania shortly after marrying. After the death of his father from tuberculosis when Frost was eleven years old, he moved with his mother and sister, Jeanie, who was two years younger, to Lawrence, Massachusetts. He became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, in 1892, and later at Harvard University in Boston, though he never earned a formal college degree.

Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first published poem, “My Butterfly," appeared on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaperThe Independent.

In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, whom he’d shared valedictorian honors with in high school and who was a major inspiration for his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after they tried and failed at farming in New Hampshire. It was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work.

By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy’s Will (Henry Holt and Company, 1913) and North of Boston (Henry Holt and Company, 1914), and his reputation was established. By the 1920s, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (Henry Holt and Company, 1923), A Further Range (Henry Holt and Company, 1936), Steeple Bush (Henry Holt and Company, 1947), and In the Clearing (Holt Rinehart & Winston, 1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased.

Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England—and though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof from the poetic movements and fashions of his time—Frost is anything but merely a regional poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused with layers of ambiguity and irony.

In a 1970 review of The Poetry of Robert Frost, the poetDaniel Hoffman describes Frost’s early work as “the Puritan ethic turned astonishingly lyrical and enabled to say out loud the sources of its own delight in the world," and comments on Frost’s career as the “American Bard”: “He became a national celebrity, our nearly official poet laureate, and a great performer in the tradition of that earlier master of the literary vernacular, Mark Twain.”

About Frost, President John F. Kennedy, at whose inauguration the poet delivered a poem, said, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.”

Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.

SUMMARY

Our speaker has come to a fork in a path in the woods. It's fall, and the leaves are turning colors. He's unsure which way to go, and wishes he could go both ways. He looks down one path as far as he can see, but then he decides to take the other. He thinks the path he decides to take is not quite as worn as the other one, but really, the paths are about the same, and the fallen leaves on both look pretty fresh.

The speaker reflects on how he plans to take the road that he didn't take another day, but suspects that he probably won't ever come back. Instead, far off in the future, he'll be talking about how his decision was final and life changing.

                       STANZA 1 SUMMARY

Get out the microscope, because we’re going through this poem line-by-line.

Line 1

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

• Our speaker is describing a fork in the road. This poem was first published in 1916, when cars were only just beginning to become prominent, so these roads in the wood are probably more like paths, not roads like we'd think of them today.
• The woods are yellow, which means that it's probably fall and the leaves are turning colors.

• "Diverged" is just another word for split. There's a fork in the road.

Lines 2-3

• And sorry I could not travel both
• And be one traveler, long I stood
• The speaker wants to go down both roads at once, but since it's impossible to walk down two roads at once, he has to choose one road.
• The speaker is "sorry" he can't travel both roads, suggesting regret.
• Because of the impossibility of traveling both roads, the speaker stands there trying to choose which path he's going to take. Because he's standing, we know that he's on foot, and not in a carriage or a car.

Lines 4-5

• And looked down one as far as I could
• To where it bent in the undergrowth;
• The speaker really wants to go down both paths – he's thinking hard about his choice. He's staring down one road, trying to see where it goes. But he can only see up to the first bend, where the undergrowth, the small plants and greenery of the woods, blocks his view.
• This is where we start to think about the metaphorical meanings of this poem. If our speaker is, as we suspect, at a fork in the road of his life, and not at an actual road, he could be trying to peer into his future as far as he can. But, since he can't really predict the future, he can only see part of the path. Who knows what surprises it could hold?

                      STANZA 2 SUMMARY

Line 6

Then took the other, as just as fair,

• So after all this buildup about one road, which he's looked down for a long time, our speaker takes the other path.
• Then we get a tricky little phrase to describe this road. It's "as just as fair." Read without the first "as," this phrase is clear, if you think of fair as meaning attractive, or pretty. But the first "as" makes the phrase a little more difficult. Combining the words "just" and "fair" in the same phrase is a play on words – both of these words have multiple meanings. The phrase could mean something like "as just as it is fair," as in proper, righteous, and equal. But this doesn't quite apply to a road.
• Yet we trust that our speaker wouldn't let things get awkward without meaning it. We're guessing that he means the road is just as pretty, but that in the metaphorical world of this poem, he thinks he made the fair, or right, choice.
• But it's not fairer – it's just as fair. So he was choosing between two roads, or futures, that were different but potentially equally good.

Lines 7-8

And having perhaps the better claim,

• Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
• The speaker still seems pretty uncertain when he explains that this second path is better. It is only "perhaps" better.
• Then the speaker tells us why the path is better – it seems like it hasn't been walked on very much, because it's grassy and doesn't look worn.
• Be careful not to think that the phrase "wanted wear" is personification (it is alliteration, though). "Wanted," in this instance, means something more like "lacked."

Lines 9-10

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

• The speaker of this poem really can't seem to make up his mind! Just when we think we've got a declaration about which path is better, he changes his mind and admits that maybe they were equal after all.
• The "as for that" refers to the path being less worn.
• "The passing there" refers to traffic, probably on foot just like our speaker, that may have worn the paths down.

                 STANZA 3 SUMMARY

Lines 11-12

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

• Here, again, we hear that the paths are equal, but we find out something new, that it's morning. It's possible that our speaker is the first to travel to this place on that day.
• The paths are covered with leaves, which haven't been turned black by steps crushing them.
• Wait, we thought one path was grassy…and now it's covered with leaves. Possibly, the leaves aren't very thick, or the grass sticks up in between them. Or maybe the speaker isn't being quite honest.

Line 13

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

• The speaker seems like he's already regretting his decision. He is rationalizing his choice of path by saying he'll come back to the one he missed later.
• This is a familiar way to deal with difficult choices; "you can always come back and try it again later," we think.
• With an "Oh" at the beginning and an exclamation point at the end, this line is emphatic. The speaker feels strongly about what he's saying here.

Lines 14-15

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

• The speaker realizes that his hopes to come back and try the other path may be foolish.
• He knows how "way leads on to way" – how one road can lead to another, and then another, until you end up very far from where you started. Because of this, he doesn't think he'll ever be able to come back and take that other path, as much as he wishes he could.
• Here we return to the metaphorical meaning of this poem. In any life decision, we can hedge our bets by thinking we can always come back, try a different option later. But sometimes our decisions take us to other decisions, and yet still others, and it's impossible for us to retrace our steps and arrive back at that original decision.
• It's like deciding which college to go to – "I can always transfer" a high school senior might think. But then, once the decision is made and freshman year has passed, the reality hits that switching schools is a lot more complicated than it seems, and it's hard to start completely over somewhere else.

Lines 16-17

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

• Now we jump forward in time. We don't know exactly when, but we know that it's ages and ages "hence," or, from now. So we're probably talking years, not months.
• We know that this story is important, because the speaker will still be telling it many years later.
• He'll be telling it with a sigh, though, which is interesting because sighs can be happy, sad, or merely reflective – and we don't know what kind of sigh this is.
• So, we know that this choice is probably going to be important for the speaker's future, but we don't know if he's going to be happy about it or not.

Line 18

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

• This line is a repetition of the first line of the poem, with the subtraction of the word "yellow" and the addition of the words "and I."
• This repetition helps to bring the poem to a conclusion. It reminds us what's important in the poem – the concept of choosing between two different paths.
• Then, we get the hesitation of "and I" and the dash. This lets us know that whatever the speaker is about to say next is important.

Line 19

I took the one less traveled by,

• In this line, the speaker sums up his story and tells us that he took the road less traveled by. With the hesitation in the line before, this declaration could be triumphant – or regretful.
• Also, remember it wasn't exactly clear that the road our speaker took was the one that was less traveled. He said at first that it looked less worn, but then that the two roads were actually about equal.
• Before you start getting mad at our speaker for stretching the truth, remember that he's telling his story far in the future, a long time from when it actually happened. He's predicting that his memory will tell him that he took the road less traveled by, or that he'll lie in the future, no matter what the reality of the situation was.

Line 20

And that has made all the difference.

• At first glance it seems that this line is triumphant – the narrator took the path that no one else did, and that is what has made the difference in his life that made him successful.
• But he doesn't say that it made him successful – an optimistic reader wants the line to read positively, but it could be read either way. A "difference" could mean success, or utter failure.
• Remember, the speaker is telling us about what he's going to say in the future. From where he is now, just looking down the path as far as he can see, he can't tell if the future that it leads him to is going to be good or bad. He just knows that his choice is important – that it will make all the difference in his life.
• The speaker of this poem could be saying that his choice made all the difference while he's surrounded by his grandchildren, by a fire in a cozy little house. Or he could be saying it to the wind, while walking alone on the streets. At this point, he doesn't know – and neither do we.

         THE ROAD NOT TAKEN SYMBOLISM, IMAGERY,                                                ALLEGORY

                                          ROADS

Symbol Analysis

This poem is about actual and figurative roads: the roads we walk and drive on, and the roads we take through life. As the speaker of this poem discusses, for every road we take, there's a road we don't take. Wrong turn or not, the roads we take can end up making significant changes in our lives. And we'll always wonder about the roads that we didn't try.

• Line 1: This line sets the scene for the literal and metaphorical fork in the road that the speaker faces. The road splitting in the woods is a metaphor for a choice. Wherever the speaker's life has taken him so far, he has come to the point where, to go any farther, he needs to make a choice that takes him down one path and precludes him from taking the other. Because the fork in the road is a metaphor for choices throughout the poem, it's called an extended metaphor.
• Lines 4-5: This description of the road is a metaphor for the future. Just like we can only see a path in the woods for so far, we can only see the consequences of our decisions for a short while into our future.
• Line 6: Here, the speaker decides that, even though he's spent a long time looking down one road, he's going to take the other, which seems just as interesting. This is probably a metaphor for a sudden decision – when we think about doing one thing, like, say, staying with a boyfriend or girlfriend, for a long time. But then, all of a sudden, we find ourselves doing something else – dumping the boy or girl, and setting out on a new path. We don't know why we did it, other than that we thought we'd be just as happy with one choice as the other.
• Lines 13-15: The speaker wants to be able to take both roads, but realizes that the nature of these roads is such that he probably will never be able to come back to this place. This is a metaphor for a decision that changes everything – once you've made it you can never go back.
• Lines 18-20: The repetition of the first line brings us back to the beginning of the extended metaphor, and then the last two lines conclude the metaphor. In line 19, one of the roads is being affirmed as less traveled, even though the narrator seemed unsure before. And then we get the famous line "and that has made all the difference," which solidifies the figurative level of this poem by saying that taking the road that the speaker took, making the choice that he made, has changed his life.

                            NATURE

Symbol Analysis

You might not associate roads with nature, but remember, we're talking about a Robert Frost poem here. We're not talking highways – highways didn't even exist when this poem was written. Instead, this poem centers on two roads (more like paths) going through the woods in autumn. Nature in this poem sets the scene, and could hold metaphorical meaning as well.

• Line 1: This line gives us the setting of the poem. The speaker tells us the woods are yellow, so we can infer that it's autumn. The metaphorical significance of this poem taking place in autumn could be that the speaker is making this choice in the fall of his life, when he's beginning to grow old.
• Line 5: We find out here that these woods must be pretty thick, because a road can disappear in the undergrowth. Metaphorically, the undergrowth could represent aspects of the speaker's future that are unclear.
• Lines 7-8: The speaker is biased in favor of nature. He thinks one path could be better because fewer people have worn it down. These lines are not just about nature, but are a metaphor for a decision that is less commonly made.
• Lines 11-12: Here, we see the autumn imagery continue, and we find out that it's morning. We also see a contradiction of the earlier claim that one path is less worn than the other. This line shows us that the leaves have freshly fallen – perhaps masking which path was more or less traveled the day before. So,metaphorically, this line points out that sometimes there's no way to tell which decision is better.
• Line 18: The first line is repeated here. The detail that the woods are yellow is left out, but the repetition shows that nature is still important to the speaker.

               

                    ANALYSIS: FORM AND METER

Rhyming Quintains of Iambic Tetrameter

This poem has a pretty complicated form. We'll start with the (relatively) simple stuff. The poem consists of four stanzas with five lines each. These are called quintains. And in each quintain, the rhyme scheme is ABAAB. For example, take the first stanza:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, (A)

And sorry I could not travel both (B)

And be one traveler, long I stood (A)

And looked down one as far as I could (A)

To where it bent in the undergrowth; (B)

The rhythm of the poem is a bit trickier. It is basically iambic, which means that there is one unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable (da DUM). There are many variations in this poem, most of which are anapestic, which means that there are two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable (da da DUM).

The most common use of iambs in poetry is in pentameter, which means that there are five "feet," or units of stressed and unstressed syllables, in the poem. But this poem is in iambic tetrameter, which means that there are only four feet (tetra = four). If you read the poem aloud, you should be able to hear four distinct beats per line. It will sound roughly like this: da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM.

Let's look at the first line as an example. Stressed syllables are in bold and italic.

Two roads | diverged | in a yell|ow wood

Each of the four feet in this line is iambic except for the third, because both "in" and "a" are unstressed syllables, making it an anapest.

So this poem has a rhythm and rhyme scheme, but they depart a little from the norm, just like the speaker of this poem, who chooses his own path.

        

                           ANALYSIS: SPEAKER

Our speaker is a very conflicted guy. He doesn't tell us too much about himself, but we know that he is facing a big decision; the road he's walking on, and the life he's leading, is splitting into two separate roads up ahead. Leaves are falling and the woods are yellow, so, if the woods are a metaphor for the speaker's life, we can guess that he's somewhere in the fall of his life, maybe his forties or fifties. In this stage of his life, it's probably too late to go back and change his mind after he makes big decisions; he knows that he probably will never have time.

The decision he's up against could be something like changing careers or moving to a different place. He could just be having the typical mid-life crisis, unsure if he likes where his life is going, even though he always thought he would. Whatever the decision is, it must be major, because he knows that he'll still be talking about it far in the future, saying that it made a big difference in his life.

We can guess that he likes nature, because he's out in the woods, just wandering around without a plan of where to go next. We know he's adventurous and impulsive, because though he spends a long time contemplating one path, he takes the other in a split second. He prefers to think that the path he takes is less traveled, even though both paths are about the same, and thinks that, in the future, he'll say that he took the path less traveled no matter what.

We're not sure if our speaker is happy or sad with the choice he's made. What do you think? He might not know either.

                            

                           ANALYSIS: SETTING

Where It All Goes Down

Our setting is in a forest, but it's not "lovely dark and deep" like the woods in one of Frost's other famous poems, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." Instead, these woods are just yellow, and our speaker is not, like in the other poem, in a horse drawn cart, but on foot.

It's fall in this poem – the trees are turning colors, and the leaves are falling. It's probably quite pretty out, with the crisp smell of autumn in the air. There's a nice little road, probably gravel or dirt, running through the woods, which suggests that there's a good amount of traffic running through here. But it's early enough in the morning that the fallen leaves are still fresh on the road, and one road is even grassy. Neither road shows much sign of wear.

So here our speaker is, in the fall without a map or a worn path to lead him on his way. He studies the paths, but more to try and choose which one to take than to appreciate their beauty.

Overall, this setting would be a pretty nice place to be, looking at the colors, choosing our path as we went, and walking in the fresh air all day.

                        ANALYSIS: SOUND CHECK

The rhythm of this poem makes us feel like we are walking through the woods with the speaker. We can hear his footsteps in the steady rhythm and rhyme, with the occasional diversion to look at the colors of a particularly brilliant tree. With lines a little shorter than the average metrical poem (a poem that follows a set pattern of rhythm) and stanzas a little longer than the average rhyming poem, the sound of "The Road Not Taken" isn't like many other poems, just like the speaker, who tries to be different from everyone else when he chooses his path.

Still, we can hear in the sound of the poem that the speaker isn't speeding ahead, but proceeding slowly and carefully, as he's not quite sure he's on the right path. The most obvious indication of this hesitation in the sound of the poem is in the last stanza, where the speaker repeats the word "I." This sounds like the speaker has stopped walking for a moment, and even the birds in the wood have stopped to listen to how the speaker will end the poem.

         ANALYSIS: WHAT'S UP WITH THE TITLE?

The title of this poem may be the key to its interpretation. The title is not, as it is often mistaken to be, "The Road Less Traveled," but is "The Road Not Taken." If the title were "The Road Less Traveled," the poem would have a stranger focus on nonconformity – taking the path that others don't take. But the title "The Road Not Taken" focuses the poem on lost opportunities – the road that the speaker did not take.

The poem shows considerable ambivalence about which road is less traveled – one moment, one is more grassy, the next, they're both equally covered with fresh leaves. It seems that, on this autumn morning, neither road looked worn, regardless of what the speaker may say when he tells the story years from now.

But the speaker made a choice, and took a path. In taking that path, he gave up his chance to take the other one. Metaphorically, this means that the speaker is reflecting on his life choices, and how they are going to affect his life. What could have happened if he made a different choice? What his life would have been like?

More than anything in the text of the poem, this title hints that the poem is about lost opportunities, and the complexities of choices, not just choosing the path that is fresh and new.

                   ANALYSIS: CALLING CARD

Pick Your Own Meaning

Frost likes to leave the meaning of his poems up to the reader. He guides us in the right direction with hints and suggestions, but in the end, he uses a lot of words and phrases that probably mean one thing – but could very well mean something completely different. This makes Frost poems fun to read, because the reader gets to brainstorm lots of possible meanings, and then choose what the poem means to them. It also makes it so that every new time you read a Frost poem, you can find a slightly different meaning in it.

                        ANALYSIS: TOUGH-O-METER

The difficulty of this poem fits its subject: you're not hiking up a mountain, but taking a lovely walk in the woods. The language is pretty straightforward and easy to follow, with little bumps but no major hills to climb. However, just like the speaker of the poem has to make a decision about which path to take, you have to make a decision about what the poem means to you, because there's more than one possible meaning. Luckily, unlike choosing a path in the woods, with poetic meaning, you can choose more than one.

        THE ROAD NOT TAKEN THEME OF CHOICES

"The Road Not Taken" centers on the concept of choice. The path that the speaker is walking on is splitting in two directions, and he has to decide which way to go. This path is not just in the woods, but also represents a decision in his life. Something in his life is changing, forcing him to make a choice. Yet he has a really hard time deciding – one moment, he thinks one way is better, the next, both paths are about the same. Whether or not he has a reason why the choice he makes is better, he has to make it. And that choice changes his life.

Questions About Choices

• What do you think the fork in the road could represent in the speaker's life?
• Do you think the speaker is happy with his choice or not? Why?
• Which road do you think you would have taken if you were the speaker? Why?
• What do you think the differences between the two roads in this poem are, if any?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

Despite what the speaker's memory tells him later, the roads in this poem are equally traveled, making the speaker's choice more difficult.

The speaker is purposefully ambiguous about whether or not he's happy with his choice.

            THE ROAD NOT TAKEN THEME OF DREAMS,                                               HOPES, AND PLANS

Choices, like the choice "The Road Not Taken," are linked to the future. The speaker of this poem realizes that his choice of path will change his life. But the tricky part about the nature of the future is that the speaker won't know how his decision will change his life until it has already changed it. The speaker thinks of his lost opportunities as his choice takes him into one future and leaves another behind.

Questions About Dreams, Hopes, and Plans

• What does the title of the poem suggest about how the speaker feels about his decision?
• How old do you think the speaker in this poem is? Does that affect his perspective on the future?
• What does the speaker think his future will be like now that he's made this choice?
• How sure do you think the speaker is that he will never come back to try the other road?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

The speaker of this poem will only know whether or not he made the right decision a long time in the future.

The speaker of this poem is not unhappy with his choice, but will always wonder where the other path, the road not taken, would have led him.

       THE ROAD NOT TAKEN THEME OF MAN AND THE                                          NATURAL WORLD

Throughout "The Road Not Taken," nature is used as a metaphor for the life of the speaker. The speaker contextualizes a major decision by writing about it as if it were something he encountered while walking in a forest in the fall. This metaphor helps us wrap our minds around the complexities of a choice that will decide his future.

Questions About Man and the Natural World

• Why do you think this poem takes place in autumn?
• What do you think the roads in this poem look like?
• What is the effect of this poem taking place in a forest?
• If you had to create a metaphor about one of your major life decisions, where would your setting be?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

The speaker would prefer to take a path that would keep him closer to nature, and farther away from other people.

    THE ROAD NOT TAKEN THEME OF EXPLORATION

Our speaker is out in the woods without a map, and he doesn't know which path to take. But instead of turning tail and running back to where he came from, he chooses a path and forges on, willing to face whatever challenges that path may lead him to. He is attracted to a path that might be less traveled, which suggests that he likes to go where few people have gone before. "The Road Not Taken" embraces exploration, suggesting that the only way to see what's beyond the bend in the road is to keep walking.

Questions About Exploration

• Is the road the speaker takes actually less traveled? Why or why not?
• Why do you think the speaker chooses the path that he does?
• If the speaker could disregard the constraints of reality, what do you think he would have done?
• Why does the speaker place so much emphasis on taking the road less traveled?

Chew on This

Try on an opinion or two, start a debate, or play the devil’s advocate.

Even if both roads seem worn about the same, the speaker tries to take the one less traveled.

The speaker chooses to take the path that he does because it's different from what he originally planned on doing.