The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is one of his most popular, most reprinted, most analyzed, and most mis-construed among the unanimously acclaimed poems in his canon. "The Road Not Taken" tends to delude a reader that lucidity is simplicity, and that easy reading exempts careful reading. The subject is choice, its limitations, and its real and imagined consequences. The theme is that, in the absence of clear evidence, choice becomes chance. The divergent roads in the yellow wood, an archetypal metaphor of a chosen way of life, symbolize choice itself, and the prospect that choice and necessary may lead to retrospective irony, as they do in "The Road Not Taken."

Frost spends half his lyric vacillating not over ideas or ambition or values, but over the walker's uncertain perception of which track in the symbolic wood was, as he later concludes, the less traveled by. Hindsight will come with a sigh:

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

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Category: Literature - T