

It opens with the line “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” This immediately places the reader within an idyllic, timeless, peaceful place within nature. The first stanza of the poem establishes the setting and the mood of the poem. “The Road Not Taken” is one of his early poems, written in 1915 at a time when Frost was just returning to America after having spent some time in England. One of the more common themes within Frost’s poetry is the theme of wandering alone in the wilderness, often as a means of either finding one’s way or losing oneself in the greater landscape. Much of Frost’s life can be seen in light of the conflict between city and academic life and long walks in the country as a means of finding revelation. However, by this time, his writing was beginning to gain recognition and he was developing his own style and poetic approach. His grandfather bought him a farm that Frost attempted to work, but eventually returned to teaching, through it all demonstrating a heavy preference and talent in the area of literature. Lawrence University and they could get married (Gerber 1967).įrom here Frost again attended school, this time at Harvard, until it became necessary for him to devote himself full-time to supporting a growing family. He did this and other odd jobs until his fiancé Eleanor graduated from St. However, things didn’t work out quite the way he’d planned and he soon returned home to take over his mother’s unruly classroom. Till next time, enjoy the pleasures of life.Life was always a struggle for Frost and his family, but he did well in school and helped on the farm and eventually earned a scholarship to Dartmouth, supplemented by his grandfather, in 1892.

If you have your own, I’ll be glad to hear it from you. Our choices will always make a big difference in our lives. No matter which road we take, it is a considerable risk, and all we can do is hope for the best. If our actions resulted in the improvement of our lives, then that decision to take that path had a positive outcome. Making a wise decision and picking the right path is the choice that we all have to take.

Making a choice is more difficult if what we are hoping to achieve is not visible on the other side of the road. We make hard choices too where our lives, our friends and families, our total well-being, our future and career entirely depend on that choice. Every day in our lives we make simple choices– what food to eat, what clothes to wear, what shows to watch on the television, or where to go for our next holiday. The message in this poem is about making a choice. It is not something that we can argue or prove, instead, it is for us to understand the significance of every single word the writer was trying to express. Poems are presented to us to be enjoyed and interpreted. After reading it through, I was deeply immersed in thoughts for its complexities and sophistication. The Road Not Taken is the most well-known poem of our time. His decision to take the road that was less travelled by made all the difference in his life. He had to make a hard choice about which route to take. Without uncertainty, he decided that over time he would take the other road even though he had doubts if he would ever come back there again.Īt some point in the future, he would tell that he was confronted with a problem when two roads diverged in some wood. In other words, the same number of people must have walked on that road.īoth roads have a similar condition of wear. Upon walking on that road, he realised that the grass had worn away the same as the other road because they both been travelled equally. He figured out that taking the other path was a better option because it was grassy. However, he could not see the road very well because the forest was dense with leaves and vines. Since he cannot travel on both paths, he was considering the best possible option before deciding which direction to take. He stood for long to see where each road would lead him. As a solo traveller, he could not take both routes. The narrator in the poem encountered a problem when the road he was travelling became two separate paths.
