Read the lines and answer the questions that follow: And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh! I kept the first for another day! (a) Name the poem and who has written it? (b) Who are the ‘Both’? (c) Why did he keep the first for another day? (d) What did he doubt?
Answers
a) The excerpt is from the poem 'The Road Not Taken'. It is written by eminent poet Robert Frost.
b) 'Both' here refers to the two roads or paths that lay in front of the speaker. The speaker is in a forested area when he comes across two roads going in different directions. The two look equally unused. He refers to them as 'Both'.
c) Since the poet could only take one path at a time, he had to choose one and leave the other one unexplored. So, he chose the second path and decided to explore the first one on some other day.
d) The speaker doubts if he will ever be able to come back to explore the first path. He knows how one path leads to another and soon one has travelled quite a distance. There are hardly any chances of coming back to the first road. This is true for life too. Many times we decide to come back to a particular place or task sometime in the future, but we get so involved in other things that it is next to impossible to revisit that place or task again. It becomes a part of the past, a part that never gets fulfilled.