why did the speaker have conflicting thoughts.
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Describe the conflict the speaker feels in the poem "The Road Not Taken."
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WALLACE FIELD eNotes educator | CERTIFIED EDUCATOR
In this poem, the speaker experiences an internal conflict concerning which of the two roads he or she should take. The roads are symbolic, meaning that they have both literal and figurative meaning; they are literally there in the woods, but they also stand for something else: any significant choice that a person must make in his or her life.
The speaker examines the first road, looking far down "To where it bent in the undergrowth." Then, he or she inspects the other road, which is "just as fair," but the speaker ultimately decides that "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." In other words, about the same number of people have taken each of the two roads—neither one of them is "less traveled." The speaker says that the roads "equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black," and so we know that no one has taken either of these roads yet this morning and that they are equal in this way as well. The speaker wishes that it were possible to take both roads, just to see where each one of them leads, but the speaker knows that this just isn't possible. When a person makes one decision, that leads to another, and another, and it rarely happens that we make our way back to try the other option again.
The speaker plans to tell people, sometime in the future, that when faced with two roads, he or she took the one "less traveled"; however, the speaker has already told us that the roads are equally traveled, and one is "just as fair" as the other. This implies that the speaker wants to be thought of as brave and unique, even though, ultimately, there are no real unique choices (at least, in the world of this poem).