The Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken Why you shouldn’t take the “road” most readers of this poem have taken.

The poem seems to be saying… • Most people think this is a poem about a courageous individual who chooses the road “less travelled by.” • The poem’s culminating lines have come to stand for the way that we should all live our lives: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference.

But there are some problems with this interpretation • There was no road “less traveled by” so it could not possibly have “made all the difference”. In lines 9-10 the speaker acknowledges that “the passing there / had worn them really about the same.”

And another problem… • The speaker doesn’t actually say he took the road less traveled by until he is discussing what he will say “ages and ages and hence”. • In other words… The story is not true. It just pleases the speaker in some way to imagine telling this story about himself.

A better way to interpret this poem would be… • Frost’s poem, finally, captures the way in which we make up stories to make sense of our experience.

To be more specific about this new interpretation…. • The speaker does not start out with the intention of telling a story about how he took the famous “less travelled by;” rather, the story he tells about himself begins with him looking at “two roads” which “diverge” but are not necessarily very different from one another.

To be more specific about this new interpretation…. • As he says in stanza three, “both [roads]… equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.”

To be more specific about this new interpretation…. • The poem’s title doesn’t even mention the famous line. It is just called “the road not taken.” Maybe, if we want to go way out on a limb, we could say that the real “road not taken” by the speaker of this poem is the simple and somewhat exciting truth. At any rate…

To be more specific about this new interpretation… • Only at the very end of the poem does he blurt out the famous statement that he “took the [road] less travelled by”.

To be more specific about this new interpretation… • The final line, “and that has made all the difference” doesn’t even refer to anything we know of. What difference did it make? We don’t know. The final line seems like a triumphant but meaningless afterthought. The speaker might as well have said, “I took the road less travelled by. Ta-da!”

Now we can understand why… • The speaker seems to contradict himself several times in stanzas 2 and 3. He is tasting his imagined or remembered experience of looking down the two roads. He thinks to himself that “perhaps” one road “was grassy and wanted wear”(8). But then he thinks again that “the passing there had worn them really about the same.”

Now we can understand why… • At this point in the poem, the speaker has not yet thought of the famous story of “the [road] less travelled” by that he “shall be telling… with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence.”

Now we can understand why… • He is still playing around with his memory (or his imagination) in a way that a poet might do, for example, trying to find a meaningful story to tell about the moment before the two roads. • Even as late as stanza three it is not clear that the speaker is going to go with the idea that one road was less travelled than the other.”

Now we can also understand why… • The first sentence of the poem lasts for twelve lines and is never really completed. It ends, but the thought that began it (“Two roads diverged…”) does not come to fruition. • Of the twelve lines making up this sentence, five begin with “and”, three more with other conjunctions (then, because, though), and two more with prepositions. Each line further qualifies the moment in which the speaker “long…stood” before two roads. • The syntax of this first section of the poem undercuts any sense that this is a straightforward story about someone who decisively chose to take the “less traveled” path.

Now we can also understand why… • There is an exclamation point at the end of line 12. It represents the idea that has occurred to the speaker. The line, “Oh, I kept the first [road] for another day,” doesn’t really seem to deserve an exclamation point. But the idea that has just come to him does.

Now we can also understand why… • Thus, in line12, there is shift in the poem. • The speaker is finally done with his inconclusive comparison of the two roads. • He now turns his attention to the consequences of choosing one road over the other, and this gives the last few lines of his little poem some energy—which is probably why people only remember the end of the poem.

Now we can also understand why… • The last stanza, of course, takes place in the speaker’s imagination. He imagines himself telling the story of how taking the road “less travelled by…has made all the difference.” His imagination is strangely dramatic here—he sees himself “telling this with a sigh.”

Which suggests that future readers should… • This “sigh” ends up being the most important word in the poem. There is very little information to help us understand why the speaker sighs. However, in order to really understand why the story of the road less travelled satisfies him and allows him to conclude his reflection, we need to know what emotion lies behind this sigh. This is a question left for future readers.

The Road Not Taken