Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken Essays - Poetry, Literature

Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken The word decision is defined by Webster's Dictionary as, the act of deciding, or judgement. People have to make decisions in their lives all the time. One of the largest decisions is what to do after high school. This decision is certainly going to take you in one direction of another. And the places where your decisions would take you can differ greatly. Similarly, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost uses symbolism to demonstrate that everyone is a traveler who chooses the road to follow on his or her journey in life. Each reader comes away with a slightly different meaning from the poem; their human condition will probably dictate the context in which they will interpret the poem. While the speaker chooses which path he ought to take in the woods in Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, he also demonstrates that the decision, whether made whimsically or thought long and hard about, will change the speakers life in a way that can't be predicted. The poem starts with Two roads diverge 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... The speaker is faced with a decision. He can go down the road on the right, or he can go down the road on the left. But he realizes that he can do only one. The poem is in the past tence, therefore, the reader knows that the narrator is reflecting on a past experience. What will the traveler miss out on? There could very well be a strong feeling of regret before the choice is even made. The road that is chosen leads to the unknown as does every major decision in life. No matter how hard or long the speaker ponders which road to take, he won't be able to predict the future. And after his decision is made, he will never find out what could have been. The next stanza starts with,Then took the other, as just as fair,/And having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear... The road that the man took was obviously not for everyone because it seemed to him that the majority of the people took the other path. The fact that the traveler chooses the less travled path over the more travled indicates the personality type of the traveler. The traveler seeks to be unique and go against the grain of society. He starts the next stanza with,And both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black. The roads are described as if they had not been walked on that day. Perhaps, Frost does this because each time a person comes to the point where they have a decision to make, the situation seems new to them. Also, Frost probably made the narrator alone to emphasize how alone people are in their decisions. Next in the stanza, Frost says oh, I kept the first for another day!/Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back. The traveler comes to the realization that he will never get to experience where the other road lead. He will continue on the road that he chose and he will never come to the same place where those same two roads diverged. Frost says in the next stanza,I shall be telling this with a sigh/Somewhere ages and ages hence:/Two roads diverged in a wood... The sigh in the poem is very important because how it is interpreted can change the whole meaning of the poem for the reader. If the reader interprets the sigh as a sigh of regret then the poem will be seen as an expression of that regret. The poem will have to do with the fact that we, as mortal humans don't have the ability to explore all of life's possibilities. However, if the sigh is seen as being more meaningless to the traveler, then the poem could be seen as a satire. And the travelers decision could be seen as more of a spur-of-the-moment choice. Then in reality, he deserves no credit for his decision and Frost would then be playing the role