![]() The first stanza is not just about coming to a fork in the road of life, it is also quite specifically about how the choices we make must so often be made with the undergrowth of the unknown blocking our access to fully seeing the future consequences. Frost endows each stanza with its own individual consideration of the titular concept of choices one makes in life and how every choice one makes also allows for the potential of at least one alternative choice that was not make. The simplicity of “The Road Not Taken” is what allows the ultimately ambiguous ending to transform the poem into one with such a universally recognized meaning that it is equally suitable for hanging on a kitchen wall of a farm in Iowa and for being analyzed by English majors throughout the libraries of the world’s most esteemed colleges. In fact, “The Road Not Taken” sets itself apart from most other poems held in equitable academic esteem precisely because a reader need not be a graduate college student-or even a high school graduate-in order to understand any of the individual words or arrive at a arguable interpretation of meaning. A short poem consisting of four stanzas of five lines each composed of simple direct language constructed overwhelming from words of two syllables or less, the poem clearly has not achieved its high status as a result of experimentation with elements of the form like rhyme scheme, meter or even the use of unusually figurative imagery. After all, ‘two roads diverged in a wood, and I – I took one of them, and there was absolutely nothing to pick between them’ wouldn’t have made all the difference, for there is no difference.“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is one of the most anthologized, widely-read, beloved, and analyzed poems in the American canon. Yet this isn’t true, as the poem’s speaker admits: the two paths are, in fact, equally covered with leaves – one is not ‘less traveled by’ after all, but it suits him to pretend that this was so, as a way of justifying his decision to take one road over the other. Frost’s narrator comes to a fork in the road and, lamenting the fact that he has to choose between them, takes ‘the one less traveled by’. The way the poem is often summarised – eliding the subtle self-commentary that the poem’s speaker provides – offers a clue to this interpretive misfire. Why is it, then, that many readers apparently misinterpret ‘The Road Not Taken’? How should we analyse Frost’s poem, and how have we been getting it wrong? ![]() They don’t need paraphrasing: they’re plain as day. Not how the above paraphrase-as-summary turns into more or less word-for-word recital of Frost’s words in those final few lines of the poem. In the future I’ll tell people, with a sigh, that two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less travelled by, and that’s made all the difference.’ But in reality, knowing that one road tends to lead onto another, I doubted whether I would ever come back to this spot. ![]() I decided to come back another day and take the other path, the road I hadn’t taken. Both of the roads were covered with leaves and there was no sign, on the morning I passed through that way, that anyone had walked either path yet that day. Though actually, if I’m honest, both paths were as worn as each other, suggesting that both roads were really about equal in terms of how many people had passed along them. And it seemed to be preferable, perhaps, because it wasn’t as well-trodden as the other – its grass was less worn. After spending a good while looking down one of the roads as far as I could see, I then took the other road, since it seemed just as nice. But obviously that wasn’t an option, so I spent a long while standing there and deliberating which to choose. ‘I came to a fork in the road in the yellow wood through which I was travelling, and wished I could have travelled both paths. Rather than offer a summary of ‘The Road Not Taken’, we’ll undertake a brief paraphrase of the poem’s meaning.
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