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.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
And that has made all the difference. (105)
The irony, of course, is that the speaker had no way at the time of his decision to discern which road was "the less traveled by." The flat fact in the fourth stanza settles that point conclusively; leaves covered both roads "no step had trodden black." At the end of his road or journey, the speaker may feel the need to justify how "way led onto way" by sighing over the illusion of free but uninformed choice. Critics routinely labor the analogy between Frost's choice of a poetic career as an autobiographical allegory at the core of the poem, and thereby miss the irony of his closing fallacy, for if there was real no difference between the roads his choice scarcely mattered, and could not, in th
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