"The Road Not Taken" Video

“The Road Not Taken” is a poem written by Robert Frost in 1915. The story goes that Frost composed the poem as a joke for his friend, the poet Edward Thomas, with whom Frost went on frequent walks. On these walks, Thomas could rarely decide on a path, often regretting taking the ones he did. Years after Frost published the poem, Thomas enlisted in World War I and was killed in action. Today, “The Road Not Taken” remains Frost’s most lasting contribution to poetry and one of the most widely read poems of all time.

"Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” reads the poem’s memorable first line, signifying its speaker’s arrival at a fork in the road during a walk in the forest. He is “sorry [he cannot] travel both” and considers the two paths, concluding that each one is equally well-traveled. The paths are, at least from where the speaker stands, interchangeable. Attempting to decide between them, the speaker tries to see how each path ends, but one bends in the undergrowth, its outcome unsure. Ultimately, the speaker decides to take the other path. “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” the speaker says, reassuring himself that he will return to the other trail someday.

However, the more the speaker reflects, the more he doubts that he will ever return to this exact point. Instead, his choice of path will simply lead to other forks in the road (and, therefore, to other decisions). He will move on and, in effect, will continue to make decisions that he can never take back.

The speaker concludes the poem by looking to the future, predicting that he will tell the story of his encounter with the two paths “somewhere ages and ages hence.” However, the speaker admits that he will likely claim that he took the road less traveled by, when in fact, as he admits at the start of the poem, the roads were equally well-traveled. Nevertheless, he will claim that his decision to take the less traveled path has “made all the difference.”

Composed in a neat rhyme scheme, the poem is often misunderstood as a piece on the virtues of taking the “less traveled” path, which implies the speaker’s courage or rebelliousness in making an unconventional choice. However, Frost’s deeper meaning is ripe for interpretation, particularly to readers who note the speaker’s intention to tell the story of his encounter with the two paths differently from the way in which it actually occurred. Ultimately, the poem reads as a meditation on choice and our inability to know what lies down the roads we do not take —as well as how we choose to tell the story.