The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, California. He became one of the most celebrated figures in American literature, earning four Pulitzer Prizes. He is one of America’s most iconic poets, known for his exploration of human emotions, nature, and the complexities of life. His poetry often delves into themes of isolation, choices, and the human condition, presented through deceptively simple language. While his settings often include rural landscapes, they serve more as backdrops for profound reflections on universal human experiences. Frost’s ability to blend deep philosophical insights with accessible verse has made him a lasting figure in American literature.

“The Road Not Taken” Text

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;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

At a Glance

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At heart, this poem is about choice: how one decision can change a person’s life. The speaker chose one path over another, and that, he says, “has made all the difference. The fork in the road is symbolic of the choice the speaker has to make about his life. Each path corresponds to a different direction his life may take, so he has to choose carefully.  

     Structurally, this poem consists of four stanzas of five lines following an ABAAB rhyme scheme. The Road Not Taken” is one of Robert Frost’s most familiar and popular poems. It comprises four stanzas of five lines each, and each line has between eight and ten syllables in a roughly iambic rhythm; the lines in each stanza rhyme in an abaab pattern. The poem’s popularity is largely a result of the simplicity of its symbolism: The speaker must choose between diverging paths in a wood, and he sees that choice as a metaphor for choosing between different directions in life. Nevertheless, for such a seemingly simple poem, it has been subject to very different interpretations of how the speaker feels about his situation and how the reader is to view the speaker. In 1961, Frost himself commented that “The Road Not Taken” is “a tricky poem, very tricky.”

     Frost wrote the poem in the first person, which raises the question of whether the speaker is the poet himself or a persona, a character created for the purposes of the poem. According to the Lawrance Thompson biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (1971), Frost would often introduce the poem in public readings by saying that the speaker was based on his Welsh friend Edward Thomas. In Frost’s words, Thomas was  “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other.”

     In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker, while walking on an autumn day in a forest where the leaves have changed to yellow, must choose between two paths that head in different directions. He regrets that he cannot follow both roads, but since that is not possible, he pauses for a long while to consider his choice. In the first stanza and the beginning of the second, one road seems preferable; however, by the beginning of the third stanza he has decided that the paths are roughly equivalent. Later in the third stanza, he tries to cheer himself up by reassuring himself that he will return someday and walk the other road.

     At the end of the third stanza and in the fourth, however, the speaker resumes his initial tone of sorrow and regret. He realizes that he probably will never return to walk the alternate path, and in the fourth stanza, he considers how the choice he must make now will look to him in the future. The speaker believes that when he looks back years later, he will see that he had chosen the “less traveled” road. He also thinks that he will later realize the large difference this choice has made in his life. Two important details suggest that the speaker believes that he will later regret having followed his chosen road: One is the idea that he will “sigh” as he tells this story, and the other is that the poem is entitled “The Road Not Taken”—implying that he will never stop thinking about the other path he might have followed.

What Is the Central Message of “The Road Not Taken?”

“The Road Not Taken” suddenly presents the speaker and the reader with a dilemma. There are two roads in an autumnal wood separating off, presumably the result of the one road splitting, and there’s nothing else to do but to choose one of the roads and continue life’s journey.

The central message is that, in life, we are often presented with choices. When making a choice, one is required to make a decision. Viewing a choice as a fork in a path, it becomes clear that we must choose one direction or another, but not both.

In “The Road Not Taken,” Frost does not indicate whether the road he chose was the right one. Nonetheless, that is the way he is going now, and the place he ends up, for better or worse, is the result of his decision.

This poem is not about taking the road less traveled, about individuality or uniqueness. This poem is about the road taken, to be sure, as well the road not taken, not necessarily the road less traveled. Any person who has made a decisive choice will agree that it is human nature to contemplate the “What if…” had you made the choice you did not
make. This pondering about the different life one may have lived had they done something differently is central to “The Road Not Taken.”

The speaker opts, at random, for the other road and, once on it, declares himself happy because it has more grass and not many folk have been down it. Anyway, he could always return one day and try the ‘original’ road again. Would that be possible? Perhaps not, life has a way of letting one thing lead to another until going backward is just no longer an option.

But who knows what the future holds down the road? The speaker implies that, when he’s older he might look back at this turning point in his life, the morning he took the road less travelled, because taking that particular route completely altered his way of being.

What Is the Structure of “The Road Not Taken?”

This poem consists of four stanzas, each five lines in length (a quintrain), with a mix of iambic and anapaestic tetrameter, producing a steady rhythmical four beat first-person narrative. The most common speech is a combination of iambs and anapaests, so Frost chose his lines to reflect this:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

This simple-looking poem, mostly monosyllabic, has a traditional rhyme scheme of ABAAB which helps keep the lines tight, whilst the use of enjambment (where one line runs into the next with no punctuation) keeps the sense flowing.

The whole poem is an extended metaphor; the road is life, and it diverges, that is, splits apart–forks. There is a decision to be made and a life will be changed. Perhaps forever.

What Is the Mood and Tone of “The Road Not Taken?”

Whilst this is a reflective, thoughtful poem, it’s as if the speaker is caught in two minds. He’s encountered a turning point. The situation is clear enough – take one path or the other, black or white – go ahead, do it. But life is rarely that simple. We’re human, and our thinking processes are always on the go trying to work things out. You take the high road, I’ll take the low road. Which is best?

So, the tone is meditative. As this person stands looking at the two options, he is weighing the pros and cons in a quiet, studied manner. The situation demands a serious approach, for who knows what the outcome will be?

All the speaker knows is that he prefers the road less traveled, perhaps because he enjoys solitude and believes that to be important. Whatever the reason, once committed, he’ll more than likely never look back.

On reflection, however, taking the road “because it was grassy and wanted wear” has made all the difference, all the difference in the world.

What Are the Poetic Devices Used in “The Road Not Taken?”

In “The Road Not Taken,” Frost primarily makes use of metaphor. Other poetic devices include the rhythm in which he wrote the poem, but these aspects are covered in the section on structure.

What Is the Figurative Meaning of “The Road Not Taken?”

Frost uses the road as a metaphor for life: he portrays our lives as a path we are walking along toward an undetermined destination. Then, the poet reaches a fork in the road. The fork is a metaphor for a life-altering choice in which a compromise is not possible. The traveler must go one way or the other.

The descriptions of each road (one bends under the undergrowth, and the other is “just as fair”) indicate to the reader that, when making a life-altering decision, it is impossible to see where that decision will lead. At the moment of decision-making, both roads present themselves equally, thus the choice of which to go down is, essentially, a toss-up–a game of chance.

The metaphor is activated. Life offers two choices, both are valid but the outcomes could be vastly different, existentially speaking. Which road to take? The speaker is in two minds. He wants to travel both and is “sorry” he cannot, but this is physically impossible.

What Is the Literal Meaning of “The Road Not Taken?”

Literally, “The Road Not Taken” tells the story of a man who reaches a fork in the road, and randomly chooses to take one and not the other.

What Is the Symbolism of “The Road Not Taken?”

The road, itself, symbolizes the journey of life, and the image of a road forking off into two paths symbolizes a choice. As for color, Frost describes the forest as a “yellow wood.” Yellow can be considered a middle color, something in-between and unsure of itself. This sets the mood of indecision that characterizes the language of the poem.

Frost also mentions the color black in the lines:

And both the morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Clearly, this is to emphasize that both roads appeared untouched, not having been tarnished by the foot of a previous traveler. The poet is the first to encounter this dilemma.