The Road not Taken by Robert Frost : Summary
The Road Not Taken: Summary
Robert Lee Frost is an American poet who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England, and his realistic verse portraying ordinary people in everyday situations. The Road Not Taken is one of Robert Frost’s most familiar and most popular poems. Frost wrote the poem in the first person, which raises the question of whether the speaker is the poet himself or a character created by him. According to Lawrance Thompson’s biography on Robert Frost, Frost would often introduce the poem in public readings by saying that the speaker of the poem was based on his Welsh friend ‘Edward Thomas’. The poem is about his friend Edward Thomas who had gone off to war.
The first stanza sets the scene for the extended metaphor of choices in the form of two roads which the speaker faces.
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both”
The road splitting in the woods is a metaphor for choice. Wherever the speaker's life has taken him so far, he has come to the point where he needs to make a choice to go any farther. The speaker wants to go down both roads at once, and feels sorry as he can't travel both roads. He's staring down one road, trying to see where it goes. But he can only see up to the first bend. This act of looking deep into the road metaphorically means that the speaker is trying to look futuristically into the decision which he has to make and the consequences of his decisions.
The second stanza tells about the decision taken by the speaker and the justification he gives for taking the decision. He claims that the path he had chosen to travel is: “having perhaps the better claim” as the path seems to be less travelled by and it “wanted wear”. Metaphorically the speaker wants to explore a career path which was less taken by and turn it as equally worn out as the path he had not chosen or the option he had left out.
The third stanza explains the morning of a day where the speaker was deep in thoughts about the decision he had made. Either he's already regretting his decision of taking the other path or wants to experience the journey through the untaken road.
“Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.”
The speaker feels strongly about what he's saying here as every way will lead to another just like the life which goes on. The speaker realises that it will be foolish of his hopes to ever come back and try the other path. This realisation is the metaphor of a decision with no turning back from it.
"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:"
In the last stanza the speaker realises that he probably will never return to take the alternate path, and somewhere ages and ages after he'll be telling about his decision with a sigh — which can be rather happy or sad. The poem concludes by repeating the opening line of the poetry and drawing a futuristic conclusion towards the decision taken. He says:
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
justifying the poem by saying that the choice that he made, has changed his life in whichever way it has to.
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