The Road Not Taken

Summary

The Road Not Taken is a twenty-line lyric in four five-line stanzas, first printed in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and placed by Frost, in italics, at the head of his third book, Mountain Interval (1916). It is among the most quoted American poems and among the most often misread. In the first stanza a traveler stands where two roads diverge in a yellow, autumn wood. Sorry that he cannot travel both and still be one traveler, he stands a long time looking down one road to where it bends into the undergrowth. In the second he takes the other, which seems just as fair and perhaps has the better claim because it is grassy and wants wear. At once he qualifies himself: the passing there had worn them really about the same. The third stanza presses the point. Both roads lay equally that morning in leaves no step had trodden black. He tells himself he will keep the first for another day, yet knows that way leads on to way and doubts he will ever come back. The final stanza moves into the future. Ages and ages hence, the traveler predicts, he will tell this story with a sigh, saying that two roads diverged and he took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. The careful reader has just been told that the roads were nearly identical, so the closing claim belongs to the older self's retelling rather than to the facts of the morning. Frost wrote the poem while living in England, and he said it grew out of walks with his friend the Welsh poet Edward Thomas, who would regret whichever path they took and wish he had taken the other. Frost warned audiences that the poem was tricky. Its regular rhyme scheme (abaab), loose iambic tetrameter, and plain diction make it easy to memorize, while its irony about choice, chance, and the stories people tell about their lives keeps it open to argument.

Top Lessons

• Read what the poem says, not what it is remembered to say

  Stanzas 2 and 3 state plainly that the roads were worn about the same and lay equally in leaves. The famous last lines therefore describe a future telling, not the morning's facts. Careful reading means holding the whole poem together before drawing a moral from its ending.

• Choices close doors

  The traveler is sorry he cannot be one traveler and still go both ways. He tells himself he will return, but knows how way leads on to way. The poem honors the real cost of choosing: every decision gives up a life that might have been.

• The stories we tell about ourselves

  The closing stanza shows a man shaping his past into a meaningful story. Frost leaves open whether the sigh is regret, contentment, or a wry awareness that the difference was made by the telling as much as by the road.

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