Professional Documents
Culture Documents
English
Hudson
4/7/08
Mini explicative
“The Road Not Taken”
by Robert Frost
The poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost uses extensively the symbol of a road. The
poem revolves around this symbol and it would be incomplete without it. The whole poem is about a
road that is supposedly not taken. Robert Frost then goes through the poem as a traveler traveling down
it.
The poems first two stanzas describe a fork in the road and one of the options the traveler could
take. With an ABAAB rhyme scheme, one of the roads is described as grassy and seemed to want to
be worn down. These two stanzas are almost about how the road is life. The “traveler” finds a point of
decision making at one point in his life and contemplates the options, one of which is less traveled by
others. The fact that the undergrowth blocked the rest of the road showed that you cannot see down your
life into the future for each decision. The way that he says the road seemed to want wear foreshadows
his decision.
The next two stanzas describe the road even more and ends with his ultimate decision. To the
traveler, both roads seemed practically the same, but he chose to pass over the first road. He chose the
second road, telling himself that maybe one day he would go back to traverse the other road, even
though he knew how since one road led onto the next, there was little chance that he would ever come
back this way again. He ends saying that one day he would recall this time of decision and how he had
chosen one path and how this one decision out of many would affect him greatly.
The road symbolizes life in general. He uses the fork in the road to show that life has decisions,
and like how the traveler says, you can't go back to a road. He followed his heart instead of following
the crowd or as the poem says, the less worn path, and it made all the difference in his life.