The Road Not Taken and The Path of Life.

Authors Avatar

The Road Not Taken and The Path of Life

"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all    the difference. Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" is a poem about the decisions that one must make in life. When a man approaches a fork in the road on which he is traveling, he must choose which path to take. The choice that he makes, as with any choices made in life, affects him in a way that changed his life. Thematically, the poem argues that no matter how small a decision is, that decision will affect a person's life forever.

"The Road Not Taken" is told as a first-person narrative. The narrator is looking back on the decisions that have affected him. The decision that is illustrated in the poem occurred at a much earlier point in the narrator's life. Everyone has made decisions, and since it is the purpose of this poem to discuss and address those decisions, it would be easy to look beyond the narrator and see oneself. The word choice used in the poem very effectively portrays the speaker. The language used is very simple, almost as if the narrator is not speaking but thinking. In this regard, the language of thoughts may be considered simple. The straightforward, almost quiet and seducing tone acts to draw the reader into the poem allowing the reader to become the narrator.

Join now!

         Throughout the poem, Frost uses images that may be interpreted as either quite simple and direct or involved and general. For example, by interpreting images such as "Two roads... in a yellow wood," the "undergrowth," as well as the rest of the poem very specifically, one would see a simple story: A young man is walking down a road until he comes to a point where the road forked. The man must decide which path to take, one that is very worn, or "one less traveled by." He decides to take the less traveled path and keep "the first for ...

This is a preview of the whole essay