Your ideas on this famous poem

[Sospira]

This isn't for the aficionados, but for the fledgling literary enthusiasts.

What do you think this poem is about? Please back up your ideas with text quotes if you can.


1. The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost 1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.


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; 5

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, 10

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. 15

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. 20

[Poetaster]

The paths we pick during the course of our lives. I don't need to quote.

[Sospira]

The paths we pick mean what?

[Lykren]

I wonder if the lines

"I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:"

make the ending of the poem a sort of quotation of what he will say in the future, and thus not strictly accurate. Perhaps the narrator is saying something along the lines of, "Though for all I know these paths are identical, in the future I will tell people that my decision to take a particular one was very significant." It's also worth noting that the narrator says

"Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,"

so that the narrator contradicts him or herself in saying that he took the road less traveled. If I understand it correctly (and I doubt I do) this poem consists of the narrator's prediction of his or her future mendacity. To expand on that idea, maybe as a larger theme the poem is looking ahead at the narrator's own perversion, in the sense that an adult will have lost the artlessness of childhood, and further, will have lost contact with a reality that once presented itself with vivid immediacy.

[Poetaster]

The paths we pick mean what?

Exactly! What do the paths mean?

[YALASH]

Peace be on you.

"I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."

So he couraged to find new things.

"sigh" and "the title" indicates:
But things did not come out well.

Sorry for him. Good wishes for him, try next time.

[mona amon]

Hmm...seems easy, compared to most poems. It is about how difficult it is to make choices, when there is nothing to indicate what each choice will lead to, or which is the better choice.

The poet decides to take the road less travelled, but since he has not come to the end of it yet, he is still having doubts. Yes, it will make a difference, but what sort of difference? And he isn't even sure it really is the road less travelled ( "the passing there Had worn them really about the same" and "And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black.")

I like it. Sounds nice, simple, but more to it than is apparent at first.

[Calidore]

Clearly this was composed by Dorothy while reflecting on the choice she made when the Yellow Brick Road forked near the Scarecrow. It was mentioned later (in another book?) that she had chosen the more difficult path ("the road less traveled"), but that's the one she met the rest of her friends on; and "that made all the difference", because without them, she would never have made it back home.

Hey, this interpretation stuff is easy when you put your mind to it.

[Sospira]

Clearly this was composed by Dorothy while reflecting on the choice she made when the Yellow Brick Road forked near the Scarecrow. It was mentioned later (in another book?) that she had chosen the more difficult path ("the road less traveled"), but that's the one she met the rest of her friends on; and "that made all the difference", because without them, she would never have made it back home.

Hey, this interpretation stuff is easy when you put your mind to it.

Nice try, but thats the mistake most people make when reading. A closer reading will show you he isn't really saying that all.

[luhsun]

Dorothy should just click her heels (wearing the evil witch's shoes) and be back to Kansas..
I feel Frost refused to commit himself.. perhaps the play on ambiguity as to what ultimately happened made the piece even more charming.
Me, I prefer Emily's truculent sullenness :
"I’ll walk where my own nature would be leading:
It vexes me to choose another guide:
Where the gray flocks in ferny glens are feeding;
Where the wild wind blows on the mountain side."

[free]

The point is that all the ways we choose lead to the same place, the difference is how do we travel. As for the choice.... with all the experice of mine, I wonder if we have it.

[Paulclem]

The yellow wood - Autumn, perhaps his Autumn? Which perhaps accounts for why he can't travel both.

The theme could be about the choice he made to be a poet in which he has made a difference.

There's a sense of, not regret, but an awareness that his choice has blocked off other choices, but this is tempered by it making all the difference. Yet he muses on the other path and tries at the time to see where it will lead.

A great poem.

[ennison]

Ok let me be Kincaid and fire a random rifle shot or two.
Yellow: certainly autumn so this is no inexperienced traveller but one long on the road - past middle age so aware of the process of choosing and the consequences thereof.
Stands long : so perhaps a man of indecision but perhaps it's the nature of the choice. Either seems attractive or else equally unattractive.
Can see so far but only so far. When I'm on the open moor I can see for miles but the moor is not flat but full of ups and downs glens valleys and alltan. Here it's trees block his view as the path snakes through. Easily grasped image. But onward as I cast my eye I guess and fear as Burns may have said. This is life. We are not seers. Such a gift would be a curse. Not seeing ahead is a blessing.
He wants to be one traveller. To have his proverbial cake and eat it.
Nuff for one random rifle shot!

[Pompey Bum]

For Frost, yellow can also be the color of spring/youth:

Nature's first green is gold
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

In The Road Not Taken, I think the yellow wood represents the naive and somewhat self-indulgent idealism of youth: the voice inside that says Oh my non-conformity really separates me from my fellow humans. It doesn't, of course, because everyone ultimately goes his or her own way (way leading to way). In fact, the idea that there even was a "road less traveled by" turns out to be a youthful illusion: both roads are equally worn. As Frost envisions his youthful "choice" to be different (or perhaps even to become a poet), he retrojects--almost like a voice-over for the image of the two paths--an ironic and gently self-reproaching reflection:

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.

This is why the title of the poem is "The Road Not Taken" rather than "The Road Less Traveled By" (as many people call it). With maturity, one comes to understand that The Road Not Taken is exactly where one has always walked.

Many young people, of course, love this poem because they see their own supposed non-conformity reflected in the stanza above. The polite thing to do is to let them figure it out for themselves, as Frost did.

[ennison]

Points taken. Kincaid has reloaded.
Undergrowth - that's not trees so I shouldn't have said that. But it's the briars and ferns and primroses etc. enough to hide sight off the path once it takes a bend. What path is straight? (That which leads to ....)
In stanza the second he makes up his mind and yes there's the egotism of the soul that will not leap with the common herd but there's also the rueful acknowledgement that the desire to be different was not that different after all. Perhaps he was then at a stage in his life where he could not distinguish all that well between conformity and posing rebellion. Maybe the emphasis though should be placed on the Now and not the Then of the speaking voice.
The tone is wry, serious, reflective, dry.
There is deliberate ambiguity. Kincaid could afford no ambiguities on the battlefield. Nor false heroism. When he had to git he git.
Are we satis so far Sospira?