Analysis Of The Road Not Taken

Life decisions and roads

Throughout life, we are forced to make decisions that can and will greatly impact our life and change it significantly. Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken is about how one choice can make a world of difference. The speaker of this poem knows that there is a very important decision to be made and knows that there is no possible way for him to know if his decision will benefit him or not until the future. Frost uses symbols such as the roads and nature to show the reader how in life we must all make decisions that are tough but need to be made.

The poem Robert Frost wrote is about someone who is walking through the woods and suddenly comes across a fork in the road. The speaker stops for a moment and is sorry that he cannot take both roads. He takes a careful look at both paths and sees that one is more worn out than the other, but they are fairly the same. He decides to take the one that is less worn out and to save the other one for another day. He realizes that maybe we will never get the chance to come back and take that road though. He instead says that he will be talking about his life changing decision in the future with a sigh.

The setting is set in the first stanza. The speaker is in a “yellow wood” (1) and comes across “two roads diverged” (1). Given the information that the woods are yellow, it can be inferred that it is most likely fall and the leaves are changing colors. The season being fall can be seen as a symbol for someone who is in the fall of their life, as they are beginning to grow old. Later in the stanza, in lines 2 and 3, we see that the speaker really wishes that he could take both paths. Frost writes “and sorry I could not travel both” (2). This shows that the speaker is tr...

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...this poem is about to come to an end. Also, the dash after “and I” means that the speaker is hesitating to say what is next, meaning that what he is about to say is very important. The final two lines read, “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” (19-20). These two lines leave the reader with a sort of an empty feeling. We do not know whether or not the speaker is happy with his decision. All we know is that the decision he made had a very life changing outcome.

The poem, The Road not Taken, by poet Robert Frost tells the tale of someone who makes a big decision that alters their life, whether it is in a good or bad way, we will never know. Frost uses nature to his advantage by making it seem that the speaker of this poem is only talking about a fork in the road, when in reality, he is about to make a very big decision in his life.