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Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken is arguably one of the finest poems written in the English Language. Written in 1915 as a joke for his friend, Edward Thomas, who was always indecisive about which road to take when in the wood with Frost, The Road Not Taken has, over the years, become extremely famous in the literary world.
Frost's poem tells us the importance of the choices we make and how those choices, good or bad, may end up affecting our journey through life. Frost wants us to know that there comes a critical moment (in the life of everyone) when our decisions will be all that matter.
Precisely, The Road Not Taken tells us about a certain traveller who is confronted with the choice of travelling either of the two roads which stretches out before him. The traveller has never travelled both roads and does not know the dangers or opportunities that await him.
However, he has to swiftly decide which road to travel. Hear the captivating, opening lines of the 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;
The narrator becomes confused but tries to examine the situation to reach at least a rational decision. The narrator, having weighed his options, decides to travel the more grassy and relatively fair road. He says:
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,
The narrator goes on to express his regrets for being unable to travel the road not taken and hopes, though quite unlikely, that he would come back another day to travel it. Or perhaps, the road he has decided to take will somehow lead him to the road not taken.
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.
In the last stanza of the poem, the narrator consoles himself and travels into the future. He hopes that, regardless of the outcome of his decisions, the courage to travel a less travelled road will make a great difference. Therefore, the narrator implies that it is better to make a wrong decision than to wallow in the waters of indecision.
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.
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