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According to Lawrance Thompson, Frost's biographer, as Frost was once about to read the poem, he commented to his audience, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem—very tricky", perhaps intending to suggest the poem's ironic possibilities.
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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:
In his description of the trees, Frost uses one detailthe yellow leavesand 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...
The speaker briefly imagines staving off choice, wishing he could travel both / And be one traveler. (A fastidious editor might flag the repetition of travel/traveler here, but it underscores the fantasy of unitytraveling two paths at once without dividing or changing the self.) The syntax of the first stanza also mirrors this desire for simultanei...
After peering down one road as far as he can see, the speaker chooses to take the other one, which he describes as
Frost then reiterates that the two roads are comparable, observingthis timethat the roads are equally untraveled, carpeted in newly fallen yellow leaves:
As the tone becomes increasingly dramatic, it also turns playful and whimsical. Oh, I kept the first for another day! sounds like something sighed in a parlor drama, comic partly because it is more dramatic than the occasion merits: after all, the choice at hand is not terribly important. Whichever road he chooses, the speaker, will, presumably, en...
The Road Not Taken appears as a preface to Frosts Mountain Interval, which was published in 1916 when Europe was engulfed in World War I; the United States would enter the war a year later. Thomass Roads evokes the legions of men who will return to the roads they left only as imagined ghosts:
Frost was disappointed that the joke fell flat and wrote back, insisting that the sigh at the end of the poem was a mock sigh, hypo-critical for the fun of the thing. The joke rankled; Thomas was hurt by this characterization of what he saw as a personal weaknesshis indecisiveness, which partly sprang from his paralyzing depression. Thomas prescien...
The last stanzastripped of the poems earlier insistence that the roads are really about the samehas been hailed as a clarion call to venture off the beaten path and blaze a new trail. Frosts lines have often been read as a celebration of individualism, an illustration of Emersons claim that Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist. In the film...
Again, the language is stylized, archaic, and reminiscent of fairytales. Frost claims he will be telling the story somewhere ages and ages hence, a reversal of the fairytale beginning, Long, long ago in a faraway land. Through its progression, the poem suggests that our power to shape events comes not from choices made in the material worldin an au...
The fairytale-like language also accentuates the way the poem slowly launches into a conjuring trick. Frost liked to warn listeners (and readers) that you have to be careful of that one; its a tricky poemvery tricky. Part of its trick is that it enacts what it has previously claimed is impossible: the traveling of two roads at once.
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 r...
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 disappointingor neither. What is clear is that the act of choosing creates division and thwarts dreams of simultaneity. All the difference that has arisenthe loss of unityhas come fr...
Aug 18, 2016 · For example, in an otherwise penetrating essay on Frost’s ability to say two things at once, Kathryn Schulz, the book reviewer for New York magazine, mistakenly calls the poem “The Road Less Traveled” and then, in an irony Frost might have savored, describes it as “not-very-Frosty.”
Frost often emphasized that this poem is tricky. Try to understand the significance of these alterations, interpreting how changes likely deepen the poem's complexity, suggesting nuanced shifts in meaning.
Aug 19, 2018 · The Tricky Poem. Frost himself called this one of his “tricky” poems. First, there is that title: “The Road Not Taken.” If this is a poem about the road not taken, then is it about the road that the poet actually does take—the one most people do not take? This is the path that was, as he states, perhaps the better claim,
Feb 16, 2017 · But when we analyse Frost’s poem more closely, we realise how inaccurate such a summary of the poem is. Frost himself, two years before his death, lamented the way readers and critics had misinterpreted the poem, which he called ‘tricky’.
Apr 29, 2016 · The latest defense of Frost—the longest, most publicized, and most extravagantly subtitled to date—is David Orr’s The Road Not Taken: Finding America in the Poem Everyone Loves and Almost Everyone Gets Wrong.
