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Road Not Taken

Everyone is a traveler, choosing the roads to follow on the map of their continuous life. A straight path never leaves speaker with one sole direction on which to travel. Robert Frost’s poem "The Road Not Taken" is about how the choices affect speaker’s life. Frost illustrates speaker to make a difficult decision about choosing one of two equally promising roads to travel on. When speaker comes to a fork road, a decision needs to be made. Both paths are different and choosing the right one will depend on his past experience. It is this way that he chooses to decide where he is going to travel. Throughout this poem, it is obvious that decisions are not easy to make, and each decision will lead him down a different road to travel. In any case however, this poem clearly demonstrates Frost’s belief that it is the road that speaker chooses that makes him who he is.

The speaker had two roads to choose from and wonders what would have happened if he had taken the other road. The poem begins with simple sentence, "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood," as the speaker sees two roads before him and obviously he cannot travel on both at the same time. He tries to consider the consequences as he "looked down one as far as I could."

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He looks back and regrets his decision, “I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence. The speaker seems to be content with his choice, yet he tells it with a sigh. ”

It appears that the last stanza is written long after he makes his decision. It is always difficult to make a decision, because it is impossible not to wonder what will be missed out. ” He knows that once he makes a decision there's no turning back. ” He takes the other road that is “grassy and wanted wear;” indeed, the road he chooses has a “better claim” because it is the road that is less traveled on. In an attempt to make a decision, the speaker "looked down one as far as I could".

The second stanza shows the difficulty of making choices. His reason for this indecision is that “knowing how way lead on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back. This choice might again change his life and bring him new experiences. We can look back and wonder what would have happened if we choose differently. ” He again makes an excuse why he chose this particular road as he “took the one less traveled by” even though; in line he admits that both roads are really the same.

The title of this poem “The Road Not Taken” refers to the choice speaker did not make.

In the third stanza the speaker realizes he has to make a decision soon, because he just cannot stand there forever. All people make mistakes, but we must move on and learn from them so we will not make the same mistakes again.

Approximate Word count = 1054
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)

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