the road not taken robert frost analysis

The road splitting in the woods is a metaphor for a choice. Line 1: This line sets the scene for the literal and metaphorical fork in the road that the speaker faces.And we'll always wonder about the roads that we didn't try. Wrong turn or not, the roads we take can end up making significant changes in our lives. As the speaker of this poem discusses, for every road we take, there's a road we don't take. This poem is about actual and figurative roads: the roads we walk and drive on, and the roads we take through life. Check out our 'How to Read a Poem' section for a glossary of terms. Before you travel any further, please know that there may be some thorny academic terminology ahead. And for Thomas, the road he chose really did make a difference: tragically, he was killed during the Battle of Arras in 1917.Welcome to the land of symbols, imagery, and wordplay. Indeed, Frost’s poem may even have been what inspired Thomas to make up his mind and finally choose which ‘road’ to follow: he chose war over America, and ‘The Road Not Taken’ is, perhaps, what forced his hand. Frost found Thomas to be an indecisive man, and after he’d written ‘The Road Not Taken’ but before it was published, he sent it to Thomas, whose indecisiveness even extended to uncertainty over whether to follow Frost to the United States or to enlist in the army and go and fight in France.įrost intended the poem to be a semi-serious mockery of people like Thomas, but it was taken more seriously by Thomas, and by countless readers since.

What is also less well-known than it should be about ‘The Road Not Taken’ is the fact that the poem may have begun life as Frost’s gentle ribbing of his friend, the English poet Edward Thomas, with whom Frost had taken many walks during the pre-WWI years when Frost had been living in England. But Frost’s final lines are also about how taking one course means that we didn’t take another course, and that may make all the difference, and not always for the better. ‘I kidded myself that one of the roads was less well-trodden and so, to be different from the mainstream, that’s the one I took, brave and independent risk-taker and road-taker that I am.’ This isn’t true, but it’s the sort of self-myth-making we often go in for. The poem’s famous final lines are less a proud assertion of individualism than a bittersweet example of the way we always rewrite our own histories to justify the decisions we make. Should I take this job or not take this job? In titling his poem ‘The Road Not Taken’ and making the choice between two roads that diverged in a wood, Frost imparts a much greater meaning to his poem, since it represents all such ‘do X or don’t do X’ choices we face in our lives. Should I marry this person or not marry them? Those are, baldly speaking, the only two choices, even if not marrying X leads to our marrying Y. We regret not doing things all the time.īut many decisions only allow us an either/or option. When choosing one path over another, do we ever regret our choice? We often wonder about the choices we didn’t make, the chances we didn’t take. Frost’s poem foregrounds that it is the road he didn’t take which is the real subject of the poem. The poem is titled ‘The Road Not Taken’, not ‘The Road Less Travelled’. If we go back to the title of Frost’s poem, we can see that that title gives us a hint that this is the intended meaning. His ‘two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by’ is not some rousing paean to individualism but an entirely false and fabricated piece of performative narrative-weaving, as he tries to imbue his arbitrary decision with a semblance of meaning. The most famous lines in Frost’s poem are not some sincere declaration of the importance of choosing the more original and less popular course of action, of bucking the trend and standing apart from the crowd – although this is how Frost’s lines have been interpreted. So Frost’s lines about two roads that ‘diverged in a wood’ and his taking ‘the one less traveled by’ is, for all that, just a narrative shaped after the event: a story to tell people.

The road not taken robert frost analysis