Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken

Here is the poem read by Frost himself.



I first became aware of Robert Frost from the Simon and Garfunkel song "Dangling Conversations", when it was first published when I was a teenager in 1966.



Frost is an American and his poetry is widely read and appreciated by Americans, but this poem has been widely used in many parts of the world. Here is a New Zealand advertisement where the only words that are spoken are from the poem.



When people read this poem they take most notice of the last three lines:

“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”


This seems to be a paeon to individualism, where a person boldly chooses the least popular path.
The beginning of the poem seems to support this interpretation:

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;


BUT then the poet notes:

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

So really there is not much difference between the two roads.

Reading all of the last stanza puts those famous last lines into context:

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


So those last three lines are delivered, with a sigh, by the person far into the future,
looking back on a long life, trying to justify choices taken.

Maybe rather than a paeon to rugged individualism the poem is best understood as a commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering.

So individualism or self-deception? The appeal of the poem might might well be that it is both.

As David Orr concludes:

"The poem both is and isn’t about individualism, and it both is and isn’t about rationalization.
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."

I will give the poet the last word:

"You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem—very tricky,"