Surely something good was missed by taking one path over another. Road has made all the difference, but in reality, it did not matter because Meaning there is no right or wrong choice. In the third stanza, Frost describes the two paths as equal, Of individualism and a call to pave one’s own path, the autumn setting suggestsĪ bleaker meaning. While many read “The Road Not Taken” as a triumph Memory, longing, and a life once full of potential all come to the surface as the narrator stands at the crossroads, confronted by the weight of choices and the potential-and peril-of another. Just as he does in “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” Frost employs an autumn setting in “The Road Not Taken” to evoke a mournful setting, not a cheerful one.įrost is perhaps using autumn to conjure regrets, aging, and the grim inevitability of human mortality. It is a trope Frost used in another poem, “ Nothing Gold Can Stay” ( Poetry for Students Volume 3), where he laments the fleeting beauty of summer and the onset of autumn. Why does the season matter? In poetry, imagery associated with autumn is conventionally used to evoke feelings of nostalgia, decay, and death. Grassy, meaning winter has not yet set in. Additionally, Frost refers to the path as Painting the woods yellow suggests the speaker is out for anĪutumn stroll when confronted with this consequential-or inconsequential,ĭepending on interpretation-decision. Roads splitting in a yellow wood, challenging the narrator with a choice of Is the poem really about individualism and choosing one’s own path? Or does the poem suggest the choice itself does not matter because all choices are equally valid and equally meaningless? The poem’s autumnal setting may lead to an answer.įrost begins “The Road Not Taken” describing two Despite its popularity, the work is perhaps one of Frost’s most misread poems, acquiring an optimistic, individualistic meaning not necessarily present in the text. The speaker in this poem tells us that he took the road " less traveled by." this suggests tha.Published in 1916, Robert Frost’s most popular poem, “The Road Not Taken” ( Poetry for Students Volume 2 and Poetry for Students Volume 61), is conventionally understood to be a meditation on the choices we make when confronted with a fork in the road. One decision lead to other decisions and we can never return to where or what we were before making that decision. The symbolism of roads makes it clear because "one way leads on to way," it is very doubtful that he will ever come back to take the other road. He tries to make himself feel better by saying that he left "the first for another day." However, he realizes that this is unlikely. He expresses regret that he could not take both roads. The speaker looks down one road and then goes down the other. when we come to a "fork in the road" we have to decide which road to take. Ideally, we would like to have it all and not have to choose, but life is not like that. There are advantages and disadvantages that have to be weighed. One is as fair as the other and "both that morning equally lay/in leaves no step had trodden black." What this symbolizes is that in life, difficult decisions usually involve alternatives that are closely balanced. What does Robert Frost tell us about making decisions through the symbolism in the poem? First of all, we are told that the two roads are quite similar. However, when we assume that the two roads symbolize hard decisions we have to make in life, then the poem becomes far more interesting to us. If the poem did not contain symbolism and was merely a story about a person walking in the woods, it would not be such an appealing and memorable work. ![]() In the poem, the author tells of a situation where the speaker comes across a fork in the road and he has to decide which road he is going to take. ![]() ![]() For example, in the symbolize leaving to make a difficult decision in life. Symbolism helps the details of a poem to say more and mean more. Many poem use symbolism to reveal certain parts of life or to say something important about life and about people.
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