How one decision can change a person's entire life?
The speaker chose one path over another, and that, he says, "has made all
the difference."
The fork in the road is symbolic of the choice the
speaker has to make about his life. Each path corresponds to a different
direction his life may take, so he has to choose carefully.
The Road Not Taken is one of Robert Frost’s most familiar and most
popular poems. The popularity of the poem is largely a result of the simplicity
of its symbolism: The speaker must choose between diverging paths in a wood,
and he sees that choice as a metaphor for choosing between different directions
in life. Nevertheless, for such a seemingly simple poem, it has been subject to
very different interpretations of how the speaker feels about his situation and
how the reader is to view the speaker.
Frost wrote the poem in the first person, which
raises the question of whether the speaker is the poet himself or a persona, a
character created for the purpose of the poem. According to the Lawrence
Thompson biography, The Years of Triumph (1971),
Frost would often introduce the poem in public readings by saying that the
speaker was based on his Welsh friend Edward Thomas. In Frost’s words, Thomas
was “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the
other.”
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. He regrets
that he cannot follow both roads, but since that is not possible, he pauses for
a long while to consider his choice. In the first stanza and the beginning of
the second, one road seems preferable; however, by the beginning of the third
stanza he has decided that the paths are roughly equivalent. Later in the third
stanza, he tries to cheer himself up by reassuring 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 alternate path, and in the fourth
stanza he considers how the choice he must make now will look to him in the
future. The speaker believes that when he looks back years later, he will see
that he had actually chosen the “less traveled” road. He also thinks that he
will later realize what a large difference this choice has made in his life.
Two important details suggest that the speaker believes that he will later
regret having followed his chosen road: One is the idea that he will “sigh” as
he tells this story, and the other is that the poem is entitled “The Road Not
Taken”—implying that he will never stop thinking about the other path he might
have followed.
Most
people don't realize the great American poet was being ironic when he famously
wrote that taking the road less traveled "made all the difference."
The
confusion comes up in his poem "The Road Not Taken,"
in which a traveler describes choosing between two paths through the woods.
In
the first three stanzas the traveler describes how the paths as basically the
same. They "equally lay" and were "just as fair" as each
other and were even "worn ... really about the same."
But
in the last stanza the traveler comments sarcastically on how he will someday
look back and claim "with a sigh" that choosing the "one less
traveled ... made all the difference."
People
wrongfully interpret this as evidence of the payoff for freethinking and not
following the crowd, when it actually comments about people finding meaning in
arbitrary decisions.
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.
That
so many people misinterpret this line has become famous in itself.
Robert Frost wrote The Road Not Taken as a joke for a friend, the
poet Edward Thomas. When they went walking together, Thomas
was chronically indecisive about which road they ought to take and—in
retrospect—often lamented that they should, in fact, have taken the other one.
Soon after writing the poem in 1915, Frost griped to Thomas that he had read
the poem to an audience of college students and that it had been “taken pretty
seriously … despite doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was
fooling.” However, Frost liked to quip, “I’m never more serious than when
joking.” As his joke unfolds, Frost creates a multiplicity of meanings, never
quite allowing one to supplant the other—even as “The Road Not Taken” describes
how choice is inevitable.
“The Road
Not Taken” begins with a dilemma, as many fairytales do. Out walking, the
speaker comes to a fork in the road and has to decide which path to follow:
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 …
In his description of the
trees, Frost uses one detail—the yellow leaves—and makes it emblematic of the
entire forest. Defining the wood with one feature prefigures one of the essential
ideas of the poem: the insistence that a single decision can transform a life.
The yellow leaves suggest that the poem is set in autumn, perhaps in a section
of woods filled mostly with alder or birch trees. The leaves of both turn
bright yellow in fall, distinguishing them from maple leaves, which flare red
and orange. Both birches and alders are “pioneer species,” the first trees to
come back after the land has been stripped bare by logging or forest fires. An
inveterate New England farmer and woodsman, Robert Frost would have known these
woods were “new”—full of trees that had grown after older ones had been
decimated. One forest has replaced another, just as—in the poem—one choice will
supplant another. The yellow leaves also evoke a sense of transience; one
season will soon give way to another.
… 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.
Later in
the poem, the speaker calls the road he chose “less traveled,” and it does
initially strike him as slightly grassier, slightly less trafficked. As soon as
he makes this claim, however, he doubles back, erasing the distinction even as
he makes it: “Though as for that the passing there / Had worn them really about
the same.”
Frost then reiterates that the two roads are comparable,
observing—this time—that the roads are equally untraveled, carpeted in
newly fallen yellow leaves:
And both that morning
equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
The poem
masquerades as a meditation about choice, but the critic William Pritchard
suggests that the speaker is admitting that “choosing one rather than the other
was a matter of impulse, impossible to speak about any more clearly than to say
that the road taken had ‘perhaps the better claim.’” In many ways, the poem
becomes about how—through retroactive narrative—the poet turns something as
irrational as an “impulse” into a triumphant, intentional decision. Decisions
are nobler than whims, and this reframing is comforting, too, for the way it
suggests that a life unfolds through conscious design. However, as the poem
reveals, that design arises out of constructed narratives, not dramatic
actions.
Yet,
knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
When
Frost sent the poem to Thomas, Thomas initially failed to realize that the poem
was (mockingly) about him. Instead, he believed it was a serious reflection on
the need for decisive action.
We cannot tell, ultimately, whether the speaker is pleased with
his choice; a sigh can be either contented or regretful. The speaker claims
that his decision has made “all the difference,” but the word difference itself conveys no sense of whether this
choice made the speaker’s life better or worse—he could, perhaps, be
envisioning an alternate version of life, one full of the imagined pleasures
the other road would have offered.
Indeed,
when Frost and Thomas went walking together, Thomas would often choose one fork
in the road because he was convinced it would lead them to something, perhaps a
patch of rare wild flowers or a particular bird’s nest. When the road failed to
yield the hoped-for rarities, Thomas would rue his choice, convinced the other
road would have doubtless led to something better. In a letter, Frost goaded
Thomas, saying, “No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish
you’d taken another.”
And, indeed, the title of the poem hovers over it like a ghost:
“The Road Not Taken.” According to the title, this poem is about absence. It is
about what the poem never mentions: the choice the speaker did not make, which still haunts him. Again, however,
Frost refuses to allow the title to have a single meaning: “The Road Not Taken”
also evokes “the road less traveled,” the road most people did not take.
The poem moves from a fantasy of staving off choice to a statement
of division. The reader cannot discern whether the “difference” evoked in the
last line is glorious or disappointing—or neither. What is clear is that the
act of choosing creates division and thwarts dreams of simultaneity. All
the “difference” that has arisen—the loss of unity—has come from the simple
fact that choice is always and inescapably inevitable. The repetition of I—as well as heightening the rhetorical drama—mirrors this
idea of division. The self has been split. At the same time, the repetition
of I recalls the idea of traveling two roads as one
traveler: one I stands on each side of the line break—on each side of the
verse’s turn—just as earlier when the speaker imagined being a single traveler
walking down both roads at once.
The poem also wryly undercuts the idea that division is
inevitable: the language of the last stanza evokes two simultaneous emotional
stances. The poem suggests that—through language and artifice—we can “trick”
our way out of abiding by the law that all decisions create differences. We can
be one linguistic traveler traveling two roads at once, experiencing two
meanings. In a letter, Frost claimed, “My poems … are all set to trip the
reader head foremost into the boundless.” The meaning of this poem has
certainly tripped up many readers—from Edward Thomas to the iconic English teacher
in Dead Poets Society. But the poem does not trip readers
simply to tease them—instead it aims to launch them into the boundless, to
launch them past spurious distinctions and into a vision of unbounded
simultaneity.
