Chapter - 06 Poem - 1

Unit 01

The Road Not Taken

 

About Author

Robert Lee Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963) was born in San Francisco. Although his work is basically inspired by the rural life or New England and he wrote in traditional verse forms, he is considered to be a modern poet because he used the language as it is actually spoken and his poems deal with complex social, psychological and philosophical themes which are sometimes ambiguous as well as ironic. He is one of the most popular and often-quoted American poets. He was highly honored during his lifetime and was the recipient of four Pulitzer Prizes. 

Poem

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.

Summary

 

One day, Robert Frost, travelling all alone, reaches a point where the road forks into two. He faces a problem as to which road to take to continue his journey. He is unable to decide which road to follow. He pauses for a long time. He gives a careful thought to which path he should follow. Then he decides to choose that road which seems to be less traveled. He feels it will make all the difference to his future. He decides to save the other road for another day, thought he knows that he will never get a chance to go back to it. Later, he wishes that he had taken the other road.

The poet feels that after ages from now he would be telling about his decision with a sigh. He would tell how the less frequented road, and that had made all the difference in his life.

The poet presented the difficulty or making a choice in life. We cannot travel all the roads available to us. We have to make a choice. The dilemma faced by the poet in making his choice is the dilemma that we all face at some point in your life. We, all have to make a choice. Only the future will reveal whether the choice was right or wrong. But can't go back to revert our choice. Choices and decisions are like steps that carry us forward. We can only look back and repent at our choices.

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

  

Symbol Analysis in the Poem

• Roads

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 divergence 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

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.