Claire Marionette D.

Llamas 21st Century Literature

Grade 12 St. Lorenzo de Ruiz Reflection paper

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

The “Road Not Taken” is a narrative poem written by Robert Frost. This poem is about the
importance of the choices we make in life, no matter how big or small it is. For Frost, making decisions is
not about what we spend time thinking about it or analyzing what would be the best picture of it, like
what we want to become in the future, where we go to college, and so on. But rather, the small choices we
make everyday also has a meaning that shapes our journey through life. Each decision we make has a
direction or a path that leads us somewhere we may not fully aware the essence of it until such time.

In the first stanza of the poem, the writer tells us that we, one single person cannot choose both
directions at the same time. You have to choose a path to shut down the other path and move on. In life,
making decision is about focusing on one thing where you find or where you feel you are more likely to
be. But in reality, no matter which path we take in life, we know that we are responsible to follow it
wherever it may lead us and whatever the outcome may be. Sometimes in life, we ought to save the other
path for another time, thinking that we still might have the chance to take it, but realized after that we
cannot go back because the path we chose kept on moving. Its what they say, to keep on moving forward
because it is what it is.

In the last stanza of the poem, it means that while the choices we make are essential, how we
interpret these choices is what really makes us who we are. Even if we chose to take the path which is
‘less traveled by’, still, it made a big impact in our lives. Later in life we will look back in time and
reminisce the moments that we never knew choosing that one path made a great significance. That one
point in life where we got lost in the process but found ourselves to where the path ends and how it
significantly made us into something unexpected.

Hence, the meaning behind the poem tells us how important the choices we make for ourselves.
We never knew how making small choices greatly impacts our journey through life until we realized it.
You cannot choose both directions because you’re on your own, once we decide to make that choice, the
other path is meant to go down to keep on moving forward. These choices make us who we are, when we
go back in time, we never knew that one ‘less-traveled’, was the best decision we have ever made in our
lives.