Discuss the anticipation or remorse in the poem,‘The Road Not Taken’
Answers
Answer:
The Road Less Travelled is a fiction the speaker will later invent, an attempt to polarize his past and give himself, retroactively, more agency than he really had.
Explanation:
There is a fair amount of irony to be found here in the poem but this is also a poem
infused with the anticipation of remorse. Its title is not ‘The Road Less Travelled’ but “The Road
Not Taken”. Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if he does not want to
stand forever in the woods, one for which he has no real guide or definitive basis for decisionmaking), the speaker knows that he will second-guess himself somewhere down the line— or
at the very least he will wonder at what is irrevocably lost: the impossible, unknowable Other
Path. But the nature of the decision is such that there is no Right Path— just the chosen path
and the other path. The Road Less Travelled is a fiction the speaker will later invent, an attempt
to polarize his past and give himself, retroactively, more agency than he really had. What are
sighed for ages and ages hence are not so much the wrong decisions as the moments of
decision themselves— moments that, one atop the other, mark the passing of a life. This is the
more primal strain of remorse.