Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

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;         5 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,         10 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.         15 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.

Context: "Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, though he never earned a formal degree. Frost drifted through a string of occupations after leaving school, working as a teacher, cobbler, and editor of the Lawrence Sentinel. His first professional poem, "My Butterfly," was published on November 8, 1894, in the New York newspaper The Independent. In 1895, Frost married Elinor Miriam White, who became a major inspiration in his poetry until her death in 1938. The couple moved to England in 1912, after their New Hampshire farm failed, and 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 and North of Boston. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased. (...) Robert Frost lived and taught for many years in Massachusetts and Vermont, and died in Boston on January 29, 1963.", Robert Frost at Poets.org. 

Summary: "The Road Not Taken" was published in 1916 in the collection Mountain Interval, his third book of poems, it is the first poem in the volume, and is printed in italics to be taken as an introductory piece. It is one of Frost’s most popular works, and also one of his most often misunderstood poems.

The title of this poem may be the key to its interpretation, if the title were “The Road Less Travelled” the poem would have a focus on nonconformity – taking the path that others didn’t take, but the actual title focuses the poem on lost opportunities instead, "The Road Not Taken", and the whimsical and incomprehensible nature of decisions. The drama of the poem is the persona making a choice between two roads, both ways equally worn and overlaid with un-trodden leaves. The speaker took a path, and by doing so he gave up his chance to take the other one, even though he tells himself that he will take the other another day, he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. What would have happened if the made a different choice? This poem is more than popular culture has made it out to be, it’s more than a call to go on your own way, it is a reflection on life’s hard choices and unknowns. He knows his choice will be important and influence the course of his life, but he does not know yet how. There may be no difference between the two roads, but “way leads to way” and is only by setting out, by working our way into the woods, that we begin to understand the meaning of the choices we make.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. This poem has created plenty of controversy, with different analysis and readings of its meaning competing with each other to attain the “true significance” of the author’s message but the key point here is really the ambiguous nature of this poem, that extends itself not only to the choice of the right path to take, if there might be such thing, but also of the right interpretation of the meaning of the poem. The vast majority of the thesis presented on this poem defend that the choice was purely whimsical, and only a few critics defend it was premeditated. We chose to sustain that his choice was arbitrary, but that his future will be influenced by it, and he might or he might not regret it, but this will be more a question of chance than of a premeditated choice, because life is defined as much by chance as by our choices.

Liliana Pascual
Teresa Garrocho