Question

appreciation of the poem road not taken by Robert frost

Answer 1

The Road Not Taken” is one of Robert Frost’s most familiar and most popular poems. It is made up of four stanzas of five lines each, and each line has between eight and ten syllables in a roughly iambic rhythm; the lines in each stanza rhyme in an abaab pattern. The popularity of the poem is largely a result of the simplicity of its symbolism: The speaker must choose between diverging paths in a wood, and he sees that choice as a metaphor for choosing between different directions in life. Nevertheless, for such a seemingly simple poem, it has been subject to very different interpretations of how the speaker feels about his situation and how the reader is to view the speaker. In 1961, Frost himself commented that “The Road Not Taken” is “a tricky poem, very tricky.”

Frost wrote the poem in the first person, which raises the question of whether the speaker is the poet himself or a persona, a character created for the purposes of the poem. According to the Lawrance Thompson biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (1971), Frost would often introduce the poem in public readings by saying that the speaker was based on his Welsh friend Edward Thomas. In Frost’s words, Thomas was “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other.”

In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker, while walking on an autumn day in a forest where the leaves have changed to yellow, must choose between two paths that head in different directions. He regrets that he cannot follow both roads, but since that is not possible, he pauses for a long while to consider his choice. In the first stanza and the beginning of the second, one road seems preferable; however, by the beginning of the third stanza he has decided that the paths are roughly equivalent. Later in the third stanza, he tries to cheer himself up by reassuring himself that he will return someday and walk the other road.

At the end of the third stanza and in the fourth, however, the speaker resumes his initial tone of sorrow and regret. He realizes that he probably will never return to walk the alternate path, and in the fourth stanza he considers how the choice he must make now will look to him in the future. The speaker believes that when he looks back years later, he will see that he had actually chosen the “less traveled” road. He also thinks that he will later realize what a large difference this choice has made in his life. Two important details suggest that the speaker believes that he will later regret having followed his chosen road: One is the idea that he will “sigh” as he tells this story, and the other is that the poem is entitled “The Road Not Taken”—implying that he will never stop thinking about the other path he might have followed.

Answer 2

Answer:

Each one of us, during our life span or say every day, come to a point in life where we need to make choices. We are often confused, as to which choice to make.We, as an individual, cannot take up all the choices. At every step we need to make a single choice and thats what makes a difference in life.

Whatever our decision or choice is, its important to keep moving on without looking back because in many conditions its very difficult to come back and choose again.On the journey of life, one road often leads to another and one can seldom relive the moments and undo the circumstances gone by. It’s better that we think deeply and have a far sight of the pros and cons, before taking a decision.The choices we make today, alters the course of our life.

‘The Road Not Taken’, A wonderful poem by Robert Frost, combines rustic simplicity with hidden, indirect and implied meanings. It holds out a moral that life is a continous journey full of divergence every now n then. According to him the two roads are symbols of challenges and choices that life has to offer.The course of life depends on which road we choose. He chose the road less travelled by and left the other, willing to travel sometime later in life. But he has gone too far and cannot return back as one road leads to another. He repents for not chosing the other one, and belives that it could have changed his life.