Name the poem & the Poet?
Why did the two roads divers
What does the two roads sym
The poets' choice made
a) No difference, by All the di
Make sentences from the foll
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by Robert Frost
The Road Not Taken book cover
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Where did the two roads diverge?
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WILLIAM DELANEY eNotes educator | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR
The two roads are not real roads but are a metaphor for a problem the speaker, presumably Robert Frost himself, encountered at a certain stage in his life. He was traveling, metaphorically, on a single road which diverged in a "yellow wood." He had to choose one road or the other. This certainly sounds like a career choice. Frost obviously wanted to be a poet. But this is an extremely precarious, if not impossible, career. Dante uses a metaphor similar to Frost's in the opening lines of his Inferno.
IN the midway of this our mortal life,
I found me in a gloomy wood, astray
Gone from the path direct:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
Che la dirrita via era smarrita.
It would seem that Frost is writing about having to make a choice, common enough for aspiring artists of all kinds, of living very frugally and devoting his life to his poetry. What is unusual about the metaphor of the roads diverging is that they form a single image that dominates most of the entire poem. The metaphor is so dominant that it may persuade the reader that it is a real fork in a real wood--which it is not.
Frost chose to take the "road" which symbolized a life of simplicity and austerity. We can see in many of his most famous poems that he lived close to nature and did a lot of work with his own hands. He wrote about the "Thoreauvian" kind of life he had to lead in order to be free to devote most of his time to his poetry. This can be seen in poems like "Mending Wall" and "Two Tramps In Mud Time." In the last stanza of "The Road Not Taken," Frost seems to be wondering whether all his sacrifices were worth it. But that could have been the case regardless of which of the two roads he had chosen.
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