anza. The meter is iambic tetrameter. The first stanza presents the situation--the traveler finds himself in the wood and has to make a choice between two roads. The necessity of making this choice is emphasized, though it is clear the traveler would be happy if he could take both roads and so have a dual experience:
This is, of course, impossible, so the traveler stands and looks first down one road, then down the other, trying to decide which to take. Frost's descriptions create a strong vision of the scene in front of the speaker. The speaker sees the first road disappear in the undergrowth, while the other road is grassy and seems not to have been used as much. This is the road that appeals to him from the first, for he says it has "perhaps the better claim" (7). Yet at some level, the two choices are equal, especially on this morning when both are covered with leaves on which no one has trod.
The decision made by the speaker is like a million decisions people make every day--they select one and hold the other for a later time. In fact, the choice they make is probably the only one they will make between these two because they will never find themselves in the same position. The fact that the choice is made takes the speaker down one road after another, and over time he will no longer be the same person and so could not be faced with precisely the same choice. At the moment of making the choice, then, he is fooling himself with his belief that he can select the other road later.
For all the sense that the choice he made was the right one, the one that made all the difference, there is also a certain sense of loss and of opportunity missed. The title of the poem, after all, is "The Road Not Taken," and this throws the focus not on the road selected but on the one left behind. The speaker knows he is not likely ever to return to this point, and he knows that he will recall this moment in the future and wonder al...