what was poets opinion about both the roads?
Answers
Note that the timing of the poem is important. The speaker seems to be reflecting on the choice just shortly after making it. The speaker waffles in any attempt to differentiate the two paths. At first they are “just as fair,” then one appears better because it “wanted wear,” then a moment later they “really about the same,” then suddenly they “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black”! In truth, we have no sense that the speaker can see a clear difference between the two — any attempt to rationalize one as better gets immediately rationalized back. One momentarily looks “less traveled,” then the next moment they look equally traveled, then both appear to be basically untraveled. We’re left with a hazy picture ourselves of the distinction.
The ending plays right into this. The speaker imagines him or herself projected out into the future, rationalizing the story with: “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” What do we make of this? Given the ambiguity, it is clear that the speaker is imagining a future rationalization of the path taken. Having no real capacity to differentiate them now, this seems to be a commentary on our natural impulse to see our decisions as right when, in point of fact, we are usually just guessing when we make them.
The verbiage “that has made all the difference” is also intriguing. It seems to leave us with a question of what has “made the difference,” or to gloss it differently, generated a distinction where there is none. Perhaps it is the speaker’s posthumous rationalization that has generated a distinction where there was none. Perhaps it is taking the road that has made the difference (you can’t really tell the difference until you take it, after all). Perhaps it is the very act of making a deliberate decision in the absence of clarity that has generated the difference — had the speaker just given up, or waffled indefinitely, or consulted someone else, it is possible that nothing would have happened at all. Sure, the speaker cannot travel both roads, but without a decision to take one, the speaker could never say anything at all.
And this also leads us to the interesting notion of counterfactuals that the poem raises — we can never take both roads. When we take one path, we don’t get to know the other. So whenever we are talking about differences and distinctions, the merits of choices, we can never assess the outcomes from more than one perspective. We can never experience the counterfactual. So difference is generated from every action we take, and yet we never get to see both sides. This is tied to interesting ideas at the heart of the human experience itself. We are alone with ourselves, unable to break out of our own subjective experience and truly experience the world from another’s perspective. Our experience is one of difference, but we never see from both the self and the other. We follow a course that is different from everyone and everything else, but making any kind of judgement that one is better than the other is silly since we never really now things from the other side as they are. All we can really say is that things are different than they might have been from this perspective.
The poem is trying to complicate ideas of how and if we decide things, and how — or if — things differentiate themselves from other things. It doesn’t leave us with a clear answer............
Answer:
What was the poet's opinion about both the roads? Answer: The poet opined that both the roads were same. They were equally travelled and there was no difference between them.