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Robert Frost's Tricky Poem

Analysis of 'The Road Not Taken'

© Linda Sue Grimes

Nov 13, 2006
Robert Frost, Wikimedia Commons
Frost said his poem "The Road Not Taken" was tricky-very tricky. Three things make his poem tricky-the time frame, and the words "sigh" and "difference."

Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has been one of the most analyzed, quoted, anthologized poems in American poetry. A wide-spread interpretation claims that the speaker in the poem is promoting individualism and non-conformity.

A Tricky Poem

Frost claims that he wrote this poem about his friend Edward Thomas, with whom he had walked many times in the woods near London. Frost has said that while walking they would come to different paths and after choosing one, Thomas would always fret wondering what they might have missed by not taking the other path.

About the poem, Frost asserted, "You have to be careful of that one; it's a tricky poem - very tricky." And he is, of course, correct. The poem has been and continues to be used as an inspirational poem, one that to the undiscerning eye seems to be encouraging self-reliance, not following where others have led.

But a close reading of the poem proves otherwise. It does not moralize about choice, it simply says that choice is inevitable but you never know what your choice will mean until you have lived it.

First Stanza – Describes Situation

The poem consists of four stanzas. In the first stanza, the speaker describes his position. He has been out walking the woods and comes to two roads, and he stands looking as far down each one as he can see. He would like to try out both, but doubts he could to that, so therefore he continues to look down the roads for a long time trying to make his decision about which road to take.

Second Stanza – Decides to Take Less-Traveled Road

He had looked down the first one “to where it bent in the undergrowth,” and in the second stanza, he reports that he decided to take the other path, because it seemed to have less traffic than the first. But then he goes on to say that they actually were very similarly worn. The second one that he took seems less traveled, but as he thinks about it, he realizes that they were “really about the same.” Not exactly that same but only “about the same.”

Third Stanza – Continue Description of Roads

The third stanza continues with the cogitation about the possible differences between the two roads. He had noticed that the leaves were both fresh fallen on them both and had not been walked on, but then again claims that maybe he would come back and also walk the first one sometime, but he doubted he would be able to, because in life one thing leads to another and time is short.

Fourth Stanza – Two Tricky Words

The fourth stanza holds the key to the trickiness of the poem:

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.

Those who interpret this poem as suggesting non-conformity take the word “difference” to be a positive difference. But there is nothing in the poem that suggests that this difference signals a positive outcome. The speaker could not offer such information, because he has not lived the “difference” yet.

The other word that leads non-discerning readers astray is the word “sigh.” By taking “difference” to mean a positive difference, they think that the sigh is one of nostalgic relief; however, a sigh can also mean regret. There is the “oh, dear” kind of sigh, but also the “what a relief” kind of sigh. Which one is it? We do not know. If it is the relief sigh, then the difference means the speaker is glad he took the road he did; if it is the regret sigh, then the difference would not be good, and the speaker would be sighing in regret. But the plain fact is we do not know what that sigh is. Again, the speaker of the poem does not even know the nature of that sigh, because that sigh and his evaluation of the difference his choice will make are still in the future. It is a truism that any choice we make is going to make “all the difference” in how our future turns out.

Careful Readers Won’t Be Tricked

So Frost was absolutely correct; his poem is tricky—very tricky. But only if we are not careful readers. If we read into poems claims that are not there. And in this poem, it is important to be careful with the time frame. When the speaker says he will be reporting sometime in the future how his road choice turned out, we have to realize that we cannot assign meaning to “sigh” and “difference,” because the speaker himself cannot know how his choice will affect his future, until after he has lived it.


The copyright of the article Robert Frost's Tricky Poem in American Poetry is owned by Linda Sue Grimes. Permission to republish Robert Frost's Tricky Poem in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.




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Comments
Apr 30, 2008 5:01 AM
Guest :
Interpretations need not be same for everyone, there need not be a logical reason for what the poet meant. Its rather what we percieve that makes a poem a poem and there can be hundereds of interpretations and every one may be right ;)
Apr 30, 2008 2:30 PM
Guest :
i have to do this for my english class and i was so confused untill i came across this website!
May 1, 2008 9:27 AM
Guest :
Interpretation should never be stated as fact. Especially in instances where so many different views are possible. Using phrases like "careful readers won't be tricked" is an attempt giving credibility to ones own opinion by discounting others.
May 2, 2008 6:04 AM
Guest :
this is a really tricky poem and its one of my favorites
May 3, 2008 9:45 AM
Guest :
I have to do this poem for my comm. arts class
and after some very careful reading I beleive this site will help me greatly.
May 3, 2008 12:53 PM
Guest :
I just went with the blatant, straightforward, and more popular view at first but this shed a bit more light on it.
May 3, 2008 3:09 PM
Guest :
does ANYONE know where i can find poetry terms for this poem!
May 3, 2008 7:11 PM
Guest :
This is one of my fav poems by THE ONE ONLY ROBERT FROST.this potry analysiis really help!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
May 4, 2008 8:30 PM
Guest :
I have to analyze this poem for English class, and this site really helped me!
May 5, 2008 7:42 AM
Guest :
I choose to interpret this poem in my own way and be inspired. Oftentimes in life, we take the easy way out. But other times, we make more difficult and less popular decisions. These choices can make all the difference in our lives about who we are and what type of person we choose to be.
May 7, 2008 11:24 PM
Guest :
Don't forget the tone of the poem! The speaker is traveling in a "YELLOW" wood. Yellow represents hope, perseverance, happiness, etc. This high spritied tone is consistent throughout the poem. With that in mind, it is not wrong for the reader to look at the sigh as a contented sigh. Although time frame is very important and often overlooked by the reader, I still think the speaker expects a positive outcome- though he still does not know what exactly the outcome will entail.

Thank you for your analysis. I am writing a paper right now for my english 355 class at CSUN and it has been a big help!
May 11, 2008 5:38 PM
Guest :
I love this poem and I use it to teach Literary Analysis in my senior english classes. I have read many comments and reviews about this poem, and find it fascinating that many times it is interpreted negatively. I do not feel it is negative at all. Actually, I teach my students that active readers bring their past life experiences with them to the text. My students have an array of interpretations of this poem and I explain that as long as they can support their interpretation with the text that there is no right or wrong answer. This is not math; 1+1=2. Literature does not follow a strict regiment like mathematics! Maybe I am the minority in my interpretation, but I still see this poem as an inspiration.
May 12, 2008 12:10 AM
Guest :
The existentialist's anxiety arises from the fact that a choice FOR one road turns out to be a choice AGAINST another road. This is true of all choices in life, and is not limited to choices between two inanimate objects. It can also refer to choices between people, jobs, careers etc., so the road fork is a metaphor for choices in general. The early existentialist philosophers tried to forge all choices into dichotomies. In practice we must often choose between many alternatives. Often the choice isn't just which of two 'roads' but actually a choice about how to choose.
Now the strange thing about choices is that it is we who make them, and in that sense no choice can ever be the wrong one. We, in fact, make it right the moment we choose it, as long as we have the courage to act on our choice.
May 13, 2008 10:12 AM
Guest :
In my opninion the last stanza can be very tricky, but it is not impossible to understand. We would have to assume that he is sighing with relief because of the words he wrote in between the sigh he made and the difference it made...he says that he took the one less traveled by. For many people that means that it was a hard journey but a positive one nonetheless...I conclude that he must have had a sigh of relief.
May 16, 2008 3:00 AM
Guest :
"Had worn them really about the same"
You have to remember that the narrator admits that the roads did as a whole look the same.
What I was taught, and what I believe, is that Robert Frost is using the two roads for the "glamour" effect. The narrator says that he will be telling the story in years to come that he took the road less travelled, although the narrator also admits that there was no solid evidence that the road was indeed less travelled (referring back to the quote), therefore he is speaking of the human nature to awe people with their tales of inspiration and "glamour" (to an extent) in their past. I believe that is why the poem is referred to as a tricky one.
Jun 8, 2008 10:08 AM
Guest :
the thing about this poem is that everyone assumes its terribly profound as its about one average bloke who chose the harder decision of the two. However despite what people initially think, we don't know which of the two are harder, as we don't, and never will know both of the outcomes. If anyhitng, the "path" that he has chosen is the most travelled by, as he is travelling it at that moment. And even if he goes back, and takes the other "path" afterwards, it wouldn't be the same.
x
Dec 15, 2008 7:07 PM
Guest :
i am doing a project on this poem and for that i needed to know the meaning to it and now i do, this site has helped me alot. :)
Dec 19, 2008 11:10 AM
Guest :
I've always thought of the sigh as being a, "Well, what's done is done" kind of sigh. Given that one gets the idea that Frost will never know what the other trail might have held, it seems that the sigh convays a sense of wondering as to what the other might have held but with no way of knowing. The fact the his friend often "fretted" about what the other trail might have been like leads me even more to believe this.

About "Had worn them really about the same," I wonder if this has to do with Frost's own life and the changing world around him. His lifestyle was certainly a road less traveled by the 20th century, but surely he knew that many had come before him and that for much of the history of the world, life in the country on a farm was normal. Modern city life would have been a road less taken. Besides, living on a small farm in the country, with open space all around, it would have been easy for him to feel like few others were living as he was. Yet many people had lived like that before (a majority at one time) and many still do.
Dec 29, 2008 3:05 PM
Guest :
I think it's ironic that many are assigned to write about this poem early in their life. And that's because it's many of the choices made while a person is still fairly young that changes their life the most. And yet, many are not prepared to make those choices in a thoughtful and well-informed way. So regret may occur or just wondering...what "if" I'd made a different choice? I think I'm old enough to fully understand the consequences and rewards of those early choices. So the "sigh"...can be both negative and positive! And even a person happy with their later lives can wonder...and sigh...what "if" I'd made a different choice, what "if" I'd taken a different path. Too late, because it's true, once you've chosen a path, seldom can you go back to try the other path. After that first path, another fork in the path, and another choice, and another after that. Life slips by. And the way back is not usually possible anymore.
Jan 4, 2009 10:39 AM
Guest :
One should be careful with interpretation. There are many poems that allow the reader to make his or her own interpretation of it, but not all poems allow this freedom. Interpretations can be wrong when the author is clearly making a definitive point and the reader chooses to ignore that point either willfully or through sloppy reading. The narrator in "The Road Not Taken" is clearly indecisive and the two roads are clearly similar - the narrator says this many times. The only way of interpreting the poem to be about individualism and inspiration is if the reader completely ignores every line of the poem except for the last two. To argue that the topic of the poem is anything the reader wants it to be is lazy. It's what bad teachers tell students about poetry. It causes confusion in students and fails to allow students to develop close reading skills. Frost has a clear message in this poem. One can claim to take whatever message they want from it but that is stubbornly ignoring the reality of the poem.
Jan 8, 2009 6:41 AM
Guest :
I agree with the comment in the fifth post below this comment. Also, only the poet himself will know what the poem truly means. Who knows maybe when he was writing this work he was swelling with mixed or lingering emotions (like some writers)that if we only knew maybe all of our analysis are right and wrong at the same time.
Feb 12, 2009 12:11 PM
Guest :
The narrator knows something about human nature that most of the readers do not recognize: we all look back on our life and try to justify that we chose the right path or that our memories are imperfect and we want them to be more glamorous or perfect. It is no different than when your father tells you how much "tougher" his high school football team was compared to yours in the present. Or how a mother might tell a daughter that she never talked back to a teacher or came to school without her homework. Those things may be true, but in most cases they are probably our perceptions of the past, clouded by years and false memories.

The narrator will be telling with a "sigh" "that I-" and there he pauses before saying that his choice made all of the difference. Ms. Grimes is correct in asserting that the narrator cannot know the outcome of the path. However he does realize that he does not want to say that his choice was a mistake.

Frost knew that people looked back over their lives and want to say that they took the right path. But he also knows that few of us want to admit that we took the wrong one, or at least a path that might have led to a better life.

I believe that Frost was telling us something in this poem. The New Criticism philosophy of reading poetry tells us to search for what the poet wants us to know. I do not believe that a poem "can mean anything you want" or "can be interpreted in many ways" unless that was the author's explicit desire. There are no hidden meanings in poems. Why would a great poet want to hide what he is trying to tell us?

Ms. Grimes, thank you for enlightening so many people with your insightful explanation of this wonderful poem. I have been teaching this same explanation for many, many years. You have provided a concise explanation of a rather complex or "tricky" poem.
Feb 13, 2009 8:14 AM
Guest :
I do think that the peom is very tricky but after checking out this website i am now able to better undersatnd the peom.
Feb 16, 2009 5:48 PM
Guest :
There is more than one path in life because each path branches off into another direction. I think the poem is talking about direction and risk taking. It is talking about the courage to take a chance and step out on a path because each path is an adventure.
Jun 8, 2009 7:35 AM
Guest :
I was a bit confused with the last two lines of the second stanza initially.I inferred a meaning of the lines but I was unconvinced of the credibility of the inference.I just logged on the net and found this site.It helped authenticate my conjecture and also informed me that Ianm not the only one having difficulty in grasping the essence of the poem.
Jun 9, 2009 9:55 AM
Guest :

"The speaker could not offer such information,
because he has not lived the “difference” yet."

"...his evaluation of the difference his choice
will make are still in the future."

I disagree. The speaker has already made an evaluation:
he has determined that his choice
"has made all the difference". As such, he has lived his choice at least
long enough to decide this, to decide that it was an important choice.
He has lived his choice at least long enough to say that his future
self will still acknowlege that it was an important choice.

"...any choice we make is going to make 'all the difference' in how our
future turns out."

I disagree. Most of the choices we make in life make little difference
at all. My choice of coffee or tea for breakfast this morning pales
in comparison with landmark choices I've made in my life, such as
where to go to school, or what job to take.

Again, clearly the author has been able to reflect on his choice long
enough to realize that it was a life changer.
Jun 10, 2009 6:27 AM
Guest :
I have to do this poem for class but i read this and i still don't understand it. Its not that its hard i just don't like poetry so i guess I will just have to find another website or ask my teacher if i can do another poem.
Jun 10, 2009 7:00 AM
Guest :
I think your interpretation is wrong, I think he is just narrating a story that had already happened; then sums everything up, "I shall be telling this with a sigh," as in he is telling right now, it has made all the difference. Once upon a time I came upon two roads diverged in a wood...hitherto, I am telling with a sigh.
Jun 10, 2009 7:18 PM
Guest :
Many times in life we experince events that have the capability of defining us. What this poem stresses that most events are neither good nor bad. They are simply events. We can stare back at the event an wonder if things would have better if we went a different way but ultimatley we will never know. It is up to make the best of the path we are on. To focus on what could be next not what it could of been.
Jun 13, 2009 1:11 AM
Guest :
Thank you guys, I've got my english exam next Monday: analyzing the poem: The Road Not Taken" :)
Jun 15, 2009 3:53 AM
Guest :
I've previously interpreted this beautiful poem as meaning different things to different readers, but I'm challenged by the comments here to see what is actually written, and what is actually being said.
Time Frame:
The speaker has clearly begun his journey ("Then took the other"), but nowhere does it does it say that he has completed it. In fact, it is most likely he has not, because he does not know where he will be when he speaks about it in the future ("SOMEWHERE ages and ages hence").
"Sigh":
Sighs can be sighs of relief, or sighs of regret. We are not told what kind of sigh the speaker expects to be "telling us with", he just says that he expects to "sigh". What is common among sighs, however, is they contain an element of resignation, of acceptance.
There have been some comments here about the speaker's hesitancy at the end of the poem ("Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -- I took the one less traveled by"), but his usage of the double "I" does not necessarily indicate hesitancy. The only thing we know for sure is that the speaker says the word twice, he is giving it importance.
He also tells us that his choice of roads will someday have made "all the difference". He doesn't say whether he expects that difference to be negative or positive, but he does expect that it will be important,that it will make "ALL the difference".
I believe the poem to be a very straightforward existential statement.
From "The Existential Primer":
"Existentialism attempts to describe our desire to make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational universe.... life might be without inherent meaning ... the human desires for logic and immortality are futile. We are forced to define our own meanings, knowing they might be temporary. In this existence… the Individual Defines Everything." http://www.tameri.com/csw/exist/index.html
Is that not what the speaker is saying to us? He "looked down one as far as I could" in an attempt to make a rational choice.
He tells us that he will "sigh", because he accepts that his attempt for rationality if futile.
Most importantly, he knows that the two roads are "about the same", that, for him, "all the difference" comes from the road "I took".
Jun 17, 2009 7:04 PM
Guest :
my teacher wants us to emphasize the poet
1st we dont` care about it...
but time went by we are acctually wrong because the poet reveals the biggest secret......
the most unforgetable moral lesson i`ve ever heard
to....
decide the right decision..... ^^
yahoo: johnley15@yahoo.com
from: PHILIPPINES ^?^
Jun 20, 2009 2:38 AM
Guest :
It is a nice explianation given by whoever and this is the kind of explianation i was looking for.I needed to do a research kind of understanding and this has helped me.May i know whoever wrote this?This is my only request to know.
Jun 20, 2009 3:02 AM
Linda Sue Grimes :
The article, "Robert Frost's Tricky Poem: Analysis of 'The Road Not Taken'" was written by Linda Sue Grimes.
Jun 20, 2009 5:53 AM
Guest :
Nice poem and way of explaination.
Jun 22, 2009 3:07 PM
Guest :
This is the best analysis of the poem I have read to date. While it is true that one is entitled to one's own interpretation, it is self-evident that certain interpretations are more readily allowed by what is actually written than others, and some not at all. For example, if I were to declare the poem is about the difficulty of seating a camel in a canoe during the 1936 Olympics then in reality I would have a hard time having my interpretion taken seriously.

The poem is very carefully constructed and brings to mind the act of trying to balance something not given over easily to being balanced. The poem is no so much about making a decision but about the art of indecision. The poet cannot really reach a conclusion about what he is actually seeing before him let alone a rational decision about which route to take. He repeatedly contradicts himself in his assessment, even after he has apparently made his decision. He deletes the notion that there is any evidence to suggest he is consciously travelling on the road less travelled by. Each time he declares the road he has chosen is 'less travelled' by he countermands it with an 'equally' or a 'same'. The poem is importantly called The Road NOT taken. He cannot know that he has actually taken the raod less travelled by because he has no notion of what lies along that other road. At the end of the poem the fact that he is actually rehearsing his end-of-the-road speech so far far ahead of its conclusion suggests guile and artifice - he has no evidence that all will end well or that at the beginning he even actually consciously chose 'the road less travelled by' but already he has determined to render his summary in a heroic light. The 'I will be telling...' suggest a future-revisionism. A sort of "I did it my way" which does not reflect the painful prevarication and confusion the early stanzas ooze. It is the heroic poem of a chiseled chin silhouetted against a golden sunset but an average joe bumbling through lifes decision determined to paper over his lack of vision with a traveller's tale, the posturing of luckless vagabond!
Jun 27, 2009 1:37 AM
Guest :
i read this poem in my poetry book
it clearly shows the mystry of life
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