Road

"The Road Not Taken"

"The Road Not Taken" is one of Robert Frost's most famous poems. This poem can be very easily misunderstood, and there are several different interpretations for the poem. Frost described his poem as being very "tricky" to convince his readers that the poem is meant to be taken as a joke on the speaker and as a parody of his attitudes towards the subject of making the right decisions (Magill 1839). This poem is about making a decision when confronted with two possible choices. Life is not simple; a person is never confronted with a decision that only has one narrow path. In "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost uses symbolism through nature to analyze one's decision-making through life; and the narrator hopes that his choices will not haunt him for the rest of his life.

"The Road Not Taken" could either be about Frost himself; or it could be about Frost's good friend, Edward Thomas. "According to the Lawrence Thompson biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (1971), Frost would often introduce the poem in public reading by saying that the speaker was based on his Welsh friend Edward Thomas" (Magill 1838). On the other hand, Frost also referred to the poem merely as "my rather private jest" (Bassett 42). It depends on how the reader interprets the poem. Frost wrote the poem in the first person, which raises the question of whether the speaker is the poet himself or another character created for the purposes of the poem. It is for the reader to decide whether he believes the speaker is Frost himself, Edward Thomas, or another character.

In many of Robert Frost's poems, he uses nature to symbolize something; for example, Frost uses woods to symbolize darkness and beauty in his poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." In "The Road Not Taken," Frost also turns landscape into a symbol as his speaker stands at a fork in the road and decides to pursue the road which is apparently "less traveled by," the road of individualism and free choice (Buccleugh 3). The speaker is at a crossroad in his life where he has to make an important decision that could change his future. Frost uses nature as a symbol for his decision-making during the crucial points in his life. Some kind of change is being set up, whereby the speaker has to make a decision between two roads that symbolize different directions in life. The speaker uses nature to hint that whichever path he chooses, he will wish in the future that he had chosen the other because he will be unhappy in the end. He wants to see one path as being better than the other, but he cannot really tell the difference between the two, "Had worn them really about the same."

The main point of the poem is that the two roads are "about the same," yet they are still diverse; that paradox is central to the poem (Fleissner 16). When the speaker first considers the two roads, he sees one road as being more difficult, perhaps even a bit menacing ("it bent in the undergrowth"), and the other as being more pleasant ("it was grassy and wanted wear") (Magill 1939). The speaker is trying to establish the two roads as being different, but they are really about the same. Even in taking the second path, though, he reconsiders and sees them both as 'equally covered with leaves'. The speaker first grasps at small details in the landscape to help him choose the better path, then seems to have the common sense to see that the two roads are essentially equivalent. The last stanza is the only place where a noticeable difference is established, "I took the one less traveled by," when he finally allows his overanxious imagination to run away with him.

Some people believe that the use of words containing the letter "y" throughout the course of the poem provides for an exact parallel with the poem's action (Ketterer 77). The speaker is trying to decide why he should choose one road over the other. Ketterer believes that looking at the two roads from above, the forking road obviously resembles the letter "Y." In the second stanza, there are no "I's" which implies that there was perhaps a suspension of identity at the moment of choice. Ketterer also mentions that Frost includes five words which rhyme with "Y/ why," including three "I's" in the final stanza of the poem. The projected future "I" of this last stanza rationalizes the choice that he has made as his having "heroically" taken the "less traveled" road "And that has made all the difference" (Ketterer 78).

Another aspect of the poem is that the speaker has three different ages: the younger self, the middle-aged self, and the older self. In many ways, the speaker's younger and older selves are alike (George 230). The speaker's younger self is displayed during the first stanza, the middle-aged self is displayed during the second and third stanzas, and the older self is displayed during the final stanza. "Compared with the middle-aged self, both are given to emotion, self-deception, and self-congratulation, and both face a decision which the middle-aged speaker sees with more objective eyes than do his younger and older selves" (George 230). The younger self did not have a choice, but the middle-aged self had to come to know about that first choice: that "both [roads] that morning equally lay." George states that the older self's deception is the only thing that causes himself to ignore what the middle-aged self clearly knows, which was that the roads were equal. The older self's "sigh" relates to the younger self's being "sorry I could not travel both/And be one traveler" (George 231). The middle aged self just tried to notice what he saw, but the older self tried to look into the two roads too much. The road not taken by the older self is the road of truth; the road that the older self does take is that of deception (George 231).

He understands that far in the future he will "sigh" about his decision. "This sigh is ambiguous: it could be one of satisfaction, of longing, or of remorse" (Clark 11). On one hand, the sigh could be of satisfaction to underscore the decision that had made "all the difference" in a positive sense. Some people believe that the speaker is sighing due to his satisfaction or happiness. The speaker could be sighing about how much this one decision has impacted his life. Another interpretation is that the speaker sigh's because he realizes that it is impossible to have chosen both roads. He wishes that he could have tried both roads, but he knows that he cannot.