“Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Ivan Kapkov

IB Literature Performance

Ms. Guarino

“Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost

Poem The “Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is a poem about making a decision that could possibly change a person's entire life. This poem was written in the first person, which raises the question of whether the speaker is the poet himself or a character created for the purposes of the poem.

The author stands in the woods where he must make a decision which way he should go, both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with untrodden leaves. The speaker stands in the yellow woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with untrodden leaves. Life is always a journey, this poem highlights those times in life when a decision has to be made.

The language in this poem constantly uses an old and strong language that makes reader confused at some point. In my opinion, this poem must be one of the most - often - misunderstood poems are known to a human being. One of the attractions that this poem has is its perfectly made dilemma, that reader can instantly recognize. The path is the Woods, fork on the road is a metaphor for the lifeline and its decisions. The fork is the main idea of the poem because it introduces us to the idea of free will and fate that speaker has to make. Decision or choice are two big words in human language that represent the same idea, but people don't really know how to make a decision or how to make a right decision. Making a decision is a chance to do something, in fact, it's impossible to separate the two. The theses of this poem are speakers future he either has to turn right or left, in fact, he knows that his future will depend on this moment. However, this realization is ironic and pathetic it can happen to anyone in different situations or times it will betray on your decision. At the end of the poem, you can see that speaker thinks about his future and thinks how he will see that he had chosen the wrong path. He believes that later in years he will regret the chosen road. The first lines of the poem we can clearly see that the speaker basically doesn't regret or acknowledge the decision that he made might be important to his life. However, in the end, he attempts to dive in a sense of order and explain why he choose this path. Of course the example with the “ less taken road “ kinda make sense but at the same time, he doesn't provide us with the clear explanation or the history behind the decision. The idea of this poem is extremely created because of the empathization with the narrators chose. Have to choose between two paths without having any knowledge of where each road will lead. The fact that narrator chooses the path that was less travelled consider him as a brave man who made a choice to prove to himself that he is ready for the thing that community is not a part of. The narrator is his own men who I consider is character won’t consider himself as a failure if he makes mistakes because he knows that next time everything will be different.

Throughout the poem, I had to stop multiple times considering the metaphors and language that Frost uses in his writing. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB, it's strict and masculine, except the last line that was the hardest for him to maintain to perfection. Each line has four stressed syllables. I choose this poem because the language and the idea that Robert Frost wrote could be related in the life of a simple human being who doesn't know what is right or what is wrong but he has to consider which to pick, and at the end, you made the decision that was part of your destiny.