appreciation of the poem the road not taken
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In Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, the popular view is that it is written about a friend of Frost's and is a tongue-in-cheek attempt at humor as Frost recognizes his friend's inability to make even the most cursory decisions, considering them all to be potentially life-changing.
The narrator's indecision in the poem is the main focus and it is important to note that the title is not about the narrator's choice but about what he does not choose. While the narrator considers, ponders and deliberates on his choice, he cannot stop wondering about the fact that his choice has "made all the difference." The narrator does not give any details about the results of his choice only that he will still be thinking about that other road "somewhere ages and ages hence." It is apparent that, had he chosen the other road, he would be contemplating this road in years to come and asking himself the same questions. In other words, neither choice actually satisfies him.
Frost wrote the poem in the first person to give strength to the argument that sometimes there is no clear path to take and he uses metaphor to compare life's choices to a physical journey and a path which determines the future. Frost uses simple language to convey a complex theme and allows for wide interpretation. The reader will be as equally conflicted as the narrator and will be left with questions.
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.