Road Not Taken

Life is a journey with a choice of many roads to travel. Everyone is a traveler on the roads of life and must choose his own path. In Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” the traveler must decide which road is best for him. Does he take the path most traveled or does he go down “the one less traveled by” (19)? When one takes the road “ less traveled” (19) he is choosing his own path in life rather than following the mainstream. Frost gives support to the idea that the choices one makes in life makes him the person he is.

Frost’s importance as a poet derives from the power and memorability of particular poems. “The Death of the Hired Man” (from North of Boston) combines lyric and dramatic poetry in blank verse. “After Apple-Picking” (from the same volume) is a free-verse dream poem with philosophical undertones. “Mending Wall” (all published in North of Boston) demonstrates Frost’s simultaneous command of lyrical verse, dramatic conversation, and ironic commentary. “The Road Not Taken” and “Birches” (from Mountain Interval) and the oft-studied “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” (from New Hampshire) exemplify Frost’s ability to join the pastoral and philosophical modes in lyrics of unforgettable beauty (Academic American Encyclopedia). The books and writers most popular with the public are rarely the ones most highly regarded by critics. Robert Frost was the most popular American poet of the twentieth century. Most Americans recognize his name, the titles of and lines from best-known poems, and even his face and the sound of his voice. Given his immense popularity, it is a remarkable testimony to the range and depth of his achievements that he is also considered, by those qualified to judge, to be one of the greats, if not the very greatest, of modern American poets (Literature Online).

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, but never earned a formal degree (Academy of American Poets)

Frost worked at a variety of jobs in his late teens and early twenties, including mill hand, newspaper reporter, and teacher in his mother’s school. In 1894, a poem of his entitled, “My Butterfly” was published in a New York journal, The Independent. This seemed to be the start of a successful career as a poet, but he would in fact endure nearly twenty years of isolation and neglect (Literature Online).

Frost married Elinor Miriam White in 1895. She was a major inspiration to his literature until she died in 1938. The first son died at an early age from cholera. This was one of many family tragedies that Frost would endure. He and Elinor had five other children, the youngest living only three days. Frost inherited a farm from his grandfather and lived on the farm for ten years. He sold the farm in 1911 and moved to England.

It was abroad that Frost met and was influenced by such contemporary British poets as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, and Robert Graves. While in England, Frost also established a friendship with the poet Ezra Pound, who helped to promote and publish his work. By the time Frost returned to the United States in 1915, he had published two full-length collections, A Boy’s Will and North of Boston, and his reputation was established. By the nineteen-twenties, he was the most celebrated poet in America, and with each new book—including New Hampshire (1923), A Further Range (1936), Steeple Bush (1947), and In the Clearing (1962)—his fame and honors (including four Pulitzer Prizes) increased (Academy of American Poets).

Upon his return to America, Frost’s outward life began to take the shape that it would follow thereafter: publication of new and collected volumes at fairly regular intervals; teaching appointments, often sinecures, at Amherst, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Michigan, with his income supplemented by a heavy schedule of lectures and poetry readings all over the country; accumulating fame and honors, including an unprecedented four Pulitzer Prizes. The capstone of his public career was his appearance at John F. Kennedy’s Presidential inauguration in January 1961. Kennedy also sent him to the Soviet Union as a sort of cultural envoy in 1962, not long before Frost’s death in a Boston hospital on January 29, 1963, eight weeks short of his eighty-ninth birthday (Literature Online).

Frost’s poetry is structured within traditional metrical and rhythmical schemes; he disliked free verse. Although he concentrates on ordinary subject matter, Frost’s emotional range is wide and deep, and his poems often shift dramatically from a tone of humorous banter to the passionate expression of tragic experience. Much of his poetry is concerned with the interaction between humans and nature. Frost regarded nature as a beautiful but dangerous force, worthy of admiration but nonetheless fraught with peril. His work shows his strong sympathy for the values of American society (Encarta).
First published in Mountain Interval, 1920, “The Road Not Taken” reflects Frost’s humanistic view. This poem tells of a traveler who must make a choice of what road to travel and chooses the road “ less traveled” (19).

“The Road Not Taken” begins by introuducing the situtation of a traveler at a crossroads in life. The first stanza sets the scene and proposes the impasse. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” (1) creates the imagery of two roads forking in a fall forest scene. The “yellow wood” (1) depicts fall with the leaves turned yellow. It is also significant that the setting is in the woods or forest. Most inhabited areas of the world have roads that are numbered, and one can use a map the get from one place to another. In the woods and forest the paths are not numbered and many times are undiscovered. Therefore, the woods or forest create the image of the unknown or unexplored. The wood is life—the unknown. The roads represent the decisions or choices made in life.

The impasse is proposed by the line “And sorry I could not travel both” (2). The dilemma is having to make a choice of which path to travel. The traveler is alone and must make the decision without any influence—“be one traveler” (3). The decision was not a hasty one. The traveler spends a long time weighing the choices at hand—“…long I stood” (3). In order to make this most important decision, the wayfarer “looks down one as far as I could” (4). The path is an unknown as are most decisions or choices we make. We never know where the decisions we make are going to lead so we try to make the right choices by weighing all our options.

The tone of the first stanza is earnest and ambivalent. The traveler is indecisive about what way to go. It is difficult to make decisions because one always wonders about what might have been had the decision been different. The traveler is “sorry I could not travel both” (2). This line indicates regret before the decision has been made. The traveler knows that in life one has to make choices or decisions that set how his life is going to be. It is not possible to travel every path much to our regret.

The second stanza explorers the other path in the wood. The traveler takes care to exam this path just as he did the first one—“Then took the other, as just as fair” (6). Frost uses imagery again to give the reader a sense of a path that has grown up—“it was grassy and wanted wear” (8). This implies that this path is not the one usually taken by those who wander in this wood. To the traveler it seems the majority of people had taken the other more popular path.
The traveler takes this path because it seems a little less worn—“having perhaps the better claim/ Because it was grassy and wanted wear” (7, 8). However, actually there is no such difference—“Though as for that the passing there/ Had worn them really about the same” (9, 10). To this particular wanderer, the other path looks to be the one less traveled. However, the next person coming along the fork in the road may see the first path as the less traveled. It depends on the individual perspective. Choosing the seemingly less traveled path also gives the reader an insight into the personality of the traveler. He is one who does not want to follow the crowd down the mainstream. He wants to do what is new and different-- that which is undiscovered and unexplored.

As in the first stanza, Frost uses an earnest, ambivalent tone to foster the seriousness of the situation. The traveler is once again examining the paths trying to make a decision on where to go. However, he now is closer to making his decision as he notes some differences in the two ways. This difference being that this path was not a popular one—“it was grassy and wanted wear” (8). Imagery again plays a role in the third stanza. Frost paints a picture of two paths covered in freshly fallen leaves—“In leaves no step had trodden black” (12). The leaves covered the ground, and no one had passed through these paths. This means that each time a person must make choices in life it is a new and different experience. To that person it seems that no one has ever had to make this decision. It is a situation unique to him.

“Oh, I kept the first for another day”(13) indicates the traveler’s desire to experience both paths. He wishes in his mind he could one day come back and travel the other road. It is a characteristic of human nature to have a tendency to think about what could have been. However, once a person makes a decision on how he will lead his life, it is difficult to change that path. “Yet knowing how way leads on to way/ I doubted if I should ever come back”(14,15) illustrates this point. The traveler realizes that this choice he has made will influence all decisions or choices he makes in the future.

As life goes on one becomes so involved in the original choice that there is no going back.
The fourth and final stanza begins with a nostalgic tone with a lingering sense of regret. When the traveler is old, “Somewhere ages and ages hence” (17), he will be “telling this with a sigh” (16). Sigh connotes sadness. The traveler will regret that he was unable to experience both choices. However, even though he regrets missing that other experience, he is satisfied with the decision he made. What is most important is that he made his own choice “And that has made all the difference” (20). He did it his way. Frost uses symbolism to develop the theme of man making a choice and growing from it. For example, the two roads represent life’s choices or the decisions made in life. The wood or forest symbolizes the unknown, the undiscovered—life. As noted previously, the “yellow wood” (1) creates the image of fall. Fall symbolizes mature life. That is the time in a person’s life when he is no longer young and must make responsible decisions.
Another humanistic quality that can be found in “The Road Not Taken” that is found in many Frost works is the personal experience aspect. Frost often injected personal experiences into the nature of his characters. This personal experience factor creates an interaction between the poem and the reader in “The Road Not Taken." A man stands at a crossroads, trying to decide which way to go. Ultimately, he chooses the one that seems “the one less traveled by” (19) though in actual fact there is little difference—“Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about the same”(9,10).

However, even after the choice is made, the traveler pictures himself looking back in his old age—“Somewhere ages and ages hence” (17)—and wondering about that road he didn’t take. This indecisive nature of the traveler creates a bond with the reader and the poem. The reader can relate this experience to a time in his life when he needed to make an important decision.

The path in life one takes shapes the person he becomes. Every decision, once made, is etched in stone and has its own unique consequences. This is a major lesson of life. “The Road Not Taken” encourages one to follow his dreams to reach his goals. It makes one think ahead about life and to seriously consider the choices he makes.