Robert Frost is beloved by professionals in English and poetry enthusiasts everywhere, possibly best known for “The Road Not Taken.”  It is this piece that has been analyzed many times, what teenage girls often quote when talking about their uniqueness and shows a much deeper conundrum than the overt “this path in the woods or the other.”  Several read-throughs yields new insights each time, including explanations on who is speaking, to whom they are speaking and exactly why this conversation is important.  Beyond this, Frost uses several poetic devices to convey a deeper meaning than what is on the surface.

            To understand the very basics of the poem, look to the speaker.  It is the same person throughout the poem, but at very different places in life.  For the first three stanzas, it would appear that it is a young man, looking along two paths in a wood, appraising them to be about the same.  This explains the line, “had worn them about the same.”  While even as a young man, he has the foresight to recognize how each action sets off a chain of events, that does not mean he is unable to prevent a choice from being made.  Stanza four is the same man, but much older, reflecting on exactly how his choice played out to lead him where he was today.  He even laments about how at the time he knew he would never be able to go back and simply try the other path (because it would lead to a completely different set of metaphorical forks in the road). 

            The listener, then, is pretty much anyone who is willing to hear out this old man in his parable.  That is, the narrator concludes with how he took the path “less traveled by” (which made “all the difference”), which is directed to a listener on the cusp of making important decisions of their own.  The thought here is that when they make those decisions, they will unfold an entirely new life path, as would happen with any decision, resulting in them reflecting the same way the old man does.  Basically, the listener is whoever might want to think twice about making a decision.

            The question then arises as to how close this poem was to Robert Frost.  Because Frost was only middle aged at the time of this writing, it is likely he was able to put himself in the shoes of an older gentleman who was able to aptly reflect on life and its many roads.  Perhaps, then, it was not such a stretch for him to write this piece, so determining whether this is a fictional persona or Frost’s own thoughts is a little more difficult to discern.  Further, Frost would have been making choices of his own (whether to go to England or stay in America, etc.) that could have influenced writing such a piece, so really, there is no definitiveness regarding whether Frost used a persona or himself to tell the poem.

            What is further interesting about “The Road Not Taken” is that it does not have a typical plot or perhaps not even a story.  There are events, yes, but what happens seems to be a little vaguer than that.  The man telling the story seems to be advising a younger generation about his own life, in that because you cannot re-choose after any one decision, caution should be given to any decision, whether it seems life-altering or not.  Or, perhaps he is just considering his own life, how he wound up where he was based on what he is telling the listener was a less-common road than what others took.  Whether or not he truly did make the unpopular choice is harder to discern, but the assumption is that it does not really matter either way, since the decision ultimately changed his life regardless.

            Because the narrative (such as it is) is simply an older man reflecting on how one choice – the literal one of taking a certain road – changes an entire life, the conflict is only choosing the road.  The first three stanzas emphasize exactly how important it is that this person chose one road over the other.  Read through just once, and it is obvious how gripping these options are for the narrator, who is faced with his own destiny.  He sees how each could play out, and it is only though ex post facto justification that he argues that the choice he made is the better of the two.  Whether it actually is, is of course debatable, but that is not the conflict as it is presented to the reader/listener.

            Now, the narrative at hand and the narrator witnessed are not captivating without excellent storytelling.  Frost accomplishes this by using explicit images and details that demonstrate how what is going on with the plot matters.  For example, the narrator takes special notice of all aspects of nature, elaborating on how only one of the trails looked as though it was less worn; he considers how it is grassier than the other.  (However, he describes it like that in retrospect, so it is likely that neither is less worn than the other, which he hints at with the line ending that stanza:  “passing there/had worn them about the same.”)

            The wordplay definitely does not stop there, though, because the entire poem is a synecdoche for any choice that could affect life.  That is, the narrator presents us with a reference to his own life, how he once walked down a wooded path that forked at one point.  Analyzing his options, he ultimately had to decide on one or the other.  For the context of reality, it is somewhat irrelevant which he actually chose, as long as it set off a chain reaction of events, which it inevitably would.  Then, the fork is a representation of any time in life where an individual must take a certain course of action.            

            One of the last major aspects of what makes this poem influential is how Frost employs the use of sound within the lines.  The most overt aspect of this is the rhyme scheme, which is of course ABAAB.  This gives the poem a natural “flow” with which the reader can easily follow, as well as provides for a simplistic pattern to listen to.  Additionally, there are few plosive sounds, no errant “p” or “k” sounds, which allows for a sonorous approach that only serves to echo the calmness of the wood the narrator describes.  Basically, all the imagery described and the sounds used to denote the imagery are all in place to calm the reader, even though the implications of the poem are pretty heavy.

            What all this boils down to is that nothing within the lines of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is unintentional, and everything discussed has some purpose.  The narrator is reflection on a seemingly insignificant choice that actually yielded important results, with the hope that listeners will understand exactly how a life could unfold from a basic decision.  The conflict, then, is not totally covert, but the wordplay works to soothe the reader, so as not to be too jarring in its message.  Ultimately, the poem is distinctly important in its own right, such that there is reason it is so heavily analyzed in the modern day. 

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost

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 marked 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.