The Road Not Taken
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"The Road Not Taken" is a narrative poem by Robert Frost, first published in the August 1915 issue of the Atlantic Monthly, and later published as the first poem in the 1916 poetry collection, Mountain Interval. Its central theme is the divergence of paths, both literally and figuratively, although its interpretation is noted for being complex and potentially divergent. |
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| wikipedia:: The Road Not Taken |
Full Text
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 travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Misunderstanding
The poem's speaker tells us he "shall be telling", at some point in the future, of how he took the road less traveled … yet he has already admitted that the two paths "equally lay / In leaves" and "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." So the road he will later call less traveled is actually the road equally traveled. The two roads are interchangeable.
Orr concluded by noting: "It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads."