The Road Not Taken And Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening Analysis

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Does the situation change the gravity of choices? Robert Frost’s poems “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” present the idea of human nature and life as a struggle to decide between two paths and whether or not it will prove successful in the end. In “The Road Not Taken,” the narrator has two roads, or two options, and must decide which one to choose despite the difficulty of them both being equal in opportunity based on the narrator saying “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” deals with the narrator having the difficult choice of finding his own peace or confronting and going back to his social obligations. Both poems show the struggles “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” both describe a situation in which a person is in conflict with himself as he tries to decide which path to take. However, the situations are so much different from each other. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both” depicts two opportunities or two choices that are available to the narrator. This could be a general decision of choosing which bread to choose for a sandwich or which class to take. With this, you can always learn from it if you made a mistake and go back to it. On the other hand, it could be an important decision of choosing a job or choosing “Then took the other, as just as fair” of “The Road Not Taken” and “To watch his woods fill up with snow” of “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” both show that they possess alliteration in that the initial consonant sounds repeat. On the other hand, “The Road Not Taken” uses symbolism where the two roads represent two choices, and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” applies metaphor when it says “He gives his harness bells a shake / To ask if there is some mistake,” which compares the sound of bells to the speaker asking if there is some mistake. In addition to that, the poem also utilizes symbolism where beauty and peace are represented in the form of the woods. Aside from that, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” uses hyperbole to exaggerate and somewhat emphasize the gravity of the decision when the narrator says “To watch his woods fill up with snow” because he would probably be dead already from the snow if he waited and because the woods would never become completely covered in snow. In “The Road Not Taken,” it is more of the exact opposite of a hyperbole in which the poem is more of a litotes where the poem is under-exaggerated. With “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” you get this big idea that the narrator will stay in the woods until it is completely

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