Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

The difficulty of the choice is evident as the speaker stands and looks first down one road, then down the other. Each seems promising. Each as its apparent benefits, and each is open to the speaker if he decides to take one or the other. The speaker can judge the two roads by whatever criteria he decides upon, and he makes his decision on the basis of the degree to which each road has been traveled in the past. He selects the road less traveled, and the other road is kept for another day. However, the speaker knows that he is very unlikely to come back this way, for once he takes the other road, he will be faced with other choices and will find himself far away, having followed choice after choice until he is far from this particular divergence:

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back (14-15).

Frost uses the choice between two roads to represent all the choices people make. His speaker is more daring than most for he selects

. . .
s apparent in this one moment. Van Gogh painted this work while at Nuenen: At Nuenen Van Gogh gave active physical toil an unprecedented reality. Its impact went far beyond anything the realist Gustave Courbet had achieved, beyond even the quasi-religious images of Jean-François Millet. He made a number of studies of peasant hands and heads before embarking on what would be his most important piece of work at Nuenen (Bernard 22). The work produced was The Potato Eaters, and Van Gogh considered it among his very best works. It has a complex narrative detail that makes it different from his other depictions of peasant life: "Never in art had respect for labor been quite so imaginatively conveyed" (Bernard 22). Van Gogh used a dark palette for this work, and the palette he used was influenced by the cost and availability of painting materials as well as by the bleak nature of the Nuenen landscape. The work used greenish colors that would not have appealed to the art dealers of Paris. Van Gogh said that the work should be displayed in a gold or copper frame or against golden wallpaper so as to echo his painted highlights. The colors used were black, olive green, raw umber, pale ocher, and raw sienna. The artist used the
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Approximate Word count = 2441
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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