The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost (March 26, 1874 – January 29, 1963)






He was an American poet. His work was initially published in England before it was published in America. One of the most popular and critically respected American poets of the twentieth century, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes for Poetry. 

Literary Legacy

In the late 1950s, Frost, along with Ernest Hemingway and T.S. Eliot, championed the release of his old acquaintance Ezra Pound, who was being held in a federal mental hospital for a crime. 
In 1961, at the age of 86, Frost was honored when asked to write and recite a poem for President John F. Kennedy's inauguration. His sight now failing, he was not able to see the words in the sunlight and substituted the reading of one of his poems, "The Gift Outright," which he had committed to memory.

Poem
 
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Analysis

This poem was written in the first person, which boosts the question of whether the speaker is the poet himself or a persona, a character created for the purposes of the poem. In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker, while walking on an autumn day in a forest where the leaves have changed to yellow, must choose between two paths that head in different directions. the beginning of the second, one road seems desirable; however, by the beginning of the third stanza he has decided that the paths are approximately equivalent.

Later in the third stanza, he tries to cheer himself up by encourage himself that he will return someday and walk the other road. At the end of the third stanza and in the fourth, however, the speaker resumes his initial tone of sorrow and regret. He realizes that he probably will never return to walk the double path, and in the fourth stanza he considers how the choice he must make now will look to him in the future.

Opinion

This poem tells about making decisions, there are two paths to choose. Also I believe that the author is having a hard time to take a decision about an important career. This poem makes us think about real decisions that we should consider to be taken, and not only look at them as metaphors.