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"The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem by Robert Frost, first published in the August 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, [1] and later published as the first poem in the 1916 poetry collection, Mountain Interval. Its central theme is the divergence of paths, both literally and figuratively, although its interpretation is noted for being complex and potentially divergent.
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The Road Not Taken begins with a dilemma, as many fairytales do. Out walking, the speaker comes to a fork in the road and has to decide which path to follow:
In his description of the trees, Frost uses one detailthe yellow leavesand makes it emblematic of the entire forest. Defining the wood with one feature prefigures one of the essential ideas of the poem: the insistence that a single decision can transform a life. The yellow leaves suggest that the poem is set in autumn, perhaps in a section of woods...
The speaker briefly imagines staving off choice, wishing he could travel both / And be one traveler. (A fastidious editor might flag the repetition of travel/traveler here, but it underscores the fantasy of unitytraveling two paths at once without dividing or changing the self.) The syntax of the first stanza also mirrors this desire for simultanei...
After peering down one road as far as he can see, the speaker chooses to take the other one, which he describes as
Frost then reiterates that the two roads are comparable, observingthis timethat the roads are equally untraveled, carpeted in newly fallen yellow leaves:
As the tone becomes increasingly dramatic, it also turns playful and whimsical. Oh, I kept the first for another day! sounds like something sighed in a parlor drama, comic partly because it is more dramatic than the occasion merits: after all, the choice at hand is not terribly important. Whichever road he chooses, the speaker, will, presumably, en...
The Road Not Taken appears as a preface to Frosts Mountain Interval, which was published in 1916 when Europe was engulfed in World War I; the United States would enter the war a year later. Thomass Roads evokes the legions of men who will return to the roads they left only as imagined ghosts:
Frost was disappointed that the joke fell flat and wrote back, insisting that the sigh at the end of the poem was a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of the thing. The joke rankled; Thomas was hurt by this characterization of what he saw as a personal weaknesshis indecisiveness, which partly sprang from his paralyzing depression. Thomas prescien...
The last stanzastripped of the poems earlier insistence that the roads are really about the samehas been hailed as a clarion call to venture off the beaten path and blaze a new trail. Frosts lines have often been read as a celebration of individualism, an illustration of Emersons claim that Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. In the film...
Again, the language is stylized, archaic, and reminiscent of fairytales. Frost claims he will be telling the story somewhere ages and ages hence, a reversal of the fairytale beginning, Long, long ago in a faraway land. Through its progression, the poem suggests that our power to shape events comes not from choices made in the material worldin an au...
The fairytale-like language also accentuates the way the poem slowly launches into a conjuring trick. Frost liked to warn listeners (and readers) that you have to be careful of that one; its a tricky poemvery tricky. Part of its trick is that it enacts what it has previously claimed is impossible: the traveling of two roads at once.
And, indeed, the title of the poem hovers over it like a ghost: The Road Not Taken. According to the title, this poem is about absence. It is about what the poem never mentions: the choice the speaker did not make, which still haunts him. Again, however, Frost refuses to allow the title to have a single meaning: The Road Not Taken also evokes the r...
The poem moves from a fantasy of staving off choice to a statement of division. The reader cannot discern whether the difference evoked in the last line is glorious or disappointingor neither. What is clear is that the act of choosing creates division and thwarts dreams of simultaneity. All the difference that has arisenthe loss of unityhas come fr...
The Road Not Taken. In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! I doubted if I should ever come back. And that has made all the difference. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it….
1963. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both. And be one traveler, long I stood. And looked down one as far as I could. To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
When was ‘The Road Not Taken’ written? From 1912 to 1915, Robert Frost lived in England. There he developed a friendship with the poet Edward Thomas. Often they went out for walks. One day, as they were walking they came across two roads diverging in different directions. Thomas was indecisive about which way to take.
Written in 1915 in England, "The Road Not Taken" is one of Robert Frost's—and the world's—most well-known poems. Although commonly interpreted as a celebration of rugged individualism, the poem actually contains multiple different meanings. The speaker in the poem, faced with a choice between two roads, takes the road "less traveled," a ...
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1963. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both. And be one traveler, long I stood. And looked down one as far as I could. To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
