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Poem Analysis - A Road Not Taken

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“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is a poem about a man who decides to take the path through life that isn’t as common or easy to take. Robert Frost is well known for this poem, among others. The poem could also be seen as an inspirational poem, telling the reader how you can be given a choice in life and you have the option to take the hard but more rewarding path, or the easy, less rewarding path. It is this choice that the poem is centered on, the choice of the speaker taking the harder, and more rewarding path through life. In the poem, the speaker tells the reader that he took a different, less trodden path and that has made a change for the better in his life. Frost states in the third stanza that while both paths looked the same in the morning, by the end of the day, they would be different and he wouldn’t have a reason to turn back. "And both that morning equally lay/ In leaves no step had trodden black./ Oh, I kept the first for another day!/ Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/ I doubted if I should ever come back" (lines 11 – 15). The speaker talks about his final decision in the fourth stanza. He states “I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence.” This could mean that he might be questioning his decision as time goes on. He also could be saying that as he gets older, he thinks he should have taken the easier route, but that chance is long gone. In the first stanza, the speaker mentions that he is apprehensive of choosing a path in life, because if he chooses one, he knows he won’t be able to come back to the other. "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,/ And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler, long I stood/ And looked down one as far as I could/ To where it bent in the undergrowth" (lines 1 – 5). The speaker takes his time in deciding his path. He realizes that he cannot see how either path will end up, so he just has to go with his gut. From where he is stand

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