The Road Not Taken

1.     Does the speaker feel that he has made the wrong choice in taking the road “less traveled by” (19)? If not, why will he “sigh” (16)? What does he regret?

a.     Although the speaker in “The Road Not Taken” never expressly says the less-used path was the right choice, we can infer he means it by line twenty. Perhaps the speaker gives a “sigh” because he wishes it were possible two take both roads, even if they were at different times. However, it was obviously impossible to go back.

2.     Why will the choice between two roads that seem very much alike make such big difference many years later?

a.     The road is supposed to symbolize life and when that is take into account, small choices are quite important. Life doesn’t have an undo button, so the speaker couldn’t really go back. Once you pour a cup of water out of a glass, you can never get the exact same drink from the cup.

In the poem “The Road Not Taken” authored by Robert Frost, he explores how small one human is in the larger picture of life and conversely how small doesn’t mean insignificant. He mentions being only one traveler and he could only look at both paths, not venture them both. The woods surround the speaker. They know where the roads lead and who has walked them. The tree’s life is unaffected by the singular being. This is a symbol for how tiny one human is in the world.

To the speaker the choice in physical and mental paths make all the difference. Although the rest of his life is not detailed, he could have gone on to rule nations or discover a cure to some disease. Many people most likely were affected by the speaker, if not in such dramatic ways. What deviation the path made to the speaker is unknown, but in his limited world the choice caused some sizable reaction else it wouldn’t have