The Road Not Taken
The poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, is a poem which when read the first time, seems very simplistic and straightforward. That is in fact not true, by any means. The poem is not only about choices and the outcomes of these choices, but it is also about the decisions we, as humans, are required to make in life and the inability to know what could have been.
The poem begins with the line: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood…” These two roads refer to two possible choices. If you picture this, you can imagine a person standing at a fork, two roads blossoming in two different directions. This person must choose one of these two. The following line reads: “And sorry I could not travel both…” This is expressing that only one choice can be made, and once it is made there is no possibility of backpedaling and going down the other road. The choice is absolute. This line also gives me the idea that Frost, if indeed he is speaking about himself, was regretful not for taking the path he took but for the fact that he could not take both paths. This is expressed undeniably in the title of the poem. The Road Not Taken. It is not titled The Road Taken. This poem is not so much about the road he decided to take as it is about the road he did not take. That being the case, Frost is stuck wondering if the other path, the one not taken, would have been a more satisfactory choice. Unfortunately though, he will never know. The last two lines of the first stanza read:
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
These lines portray that this decision of which road to take is a momentous one. You can imagine Frost standing at the fork, looking as far as he could down each path, trying to find an answer, or some physical clue as to which choice was the right one. This is not easy though, and as you read into the second stanza of the poem you understand that the final...