Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"

Robert Frost is a deeply philosophical poet with a strong sense of the spiritual as found in nature. "The Road Not Taken" presents a metaphorical choice in the form of two roads diverging from one another in the woods. The speaker cannot take both roads and must make a choice. The subject is that choice and the difficulty in making it, and the poet is speaking here not merely of a choice of real roads but a choice of metaphorical roads, the roads we choose in life, the one we take and the one we do not.

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

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