Assignment 2

Robert Frost: “The Road Not Taken” (p. 139)

Among the major concerns of Frost’s poetry are the fragility of life, the consequences of rejecting or accepting the conditions of one’s life, the passion of inconsolable grief, the difficulty of sustaining intimacy, the fear of loneliness and isolation, the inevitability of change, the tensions between the individual and society, and the place of tradition and custom. He writes in fairly traditional verse forms; he had an eye for strong, telling details, and he had an ear for natural speech rhythms.

“The Road Not Taken” intrigues readers because it is at once so simple and so deeply resonant. Recalling a walk in the woods, the speaker describes how he came to a fork in the road, which forced him to choose one path over another. Though “sorry” that he “could not travel both” (line 2) he made a choice after carefully weighing his two options. The incident Frost describes seems simple enough, but it is charged with symbolic significance by the speaker’s reflections on the necessity and consequences of his decision.

Choosing the “less traveled” path has affected his entire life, and Frost has drawn upon the familiar *metaphor of life as a journey, but he also calls our attention to a less commonly noted problem: despite our expectations, aspirations, appetites, hopes, and desires, we can’t have it all. Making one choice precludes another. It is impossible to determine what particular decision the speaker refers to–choose a college, a career, a spouse; perhaps he was confronted with mutually exclusive ideas, beliefs, or values (some readers have supposed the choice of roads concerns Frost’s decision to become a poet). There is no way to know because Frost wisely creates a symbolic choice that implicitly invites us to supply our own circumstances.

The speaker’s reflections about his choice is central to understanding the poem. He describes the road taken as “having perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear” (lines7-8), but he seems to prefer the “less traveled” path. But Frost complicates matters by having the speaker also acknowledge that there was no significant difference between the two roads: one was “just as fair” as the other; each was “worn. . . really about the same”; and “both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden back” (lines 11-13).