A Road Not Taken
The word decision is defined by Webster's Dictionary as, the act of deciding, or judgement. People have to make decisions in their lives all the time. One of the largest decisions is what to do after high school. This decision is certainly going to take you in one direction of another. And the places where your decisions would take you can differ greatly. Similarly, The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost uses symbolism to demonstrate that everyone is a traveler who chooses the road to follow on his or her journey in life. Each reader comes away with a slightly different meaning from the poem; their human condition will probably dictate the context in which they will interpret the poem. While the speaker chooses which path he ought to take in the woods in Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken, he also demonstrates that the decision, whether made whimsically or thought long and hard about, will change the speakers life in a way that can't be predicted. The poem starts with Two roads diverge 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... The speaker is faced with a decision. He can go down the road on the right, or he can go down the road on the left. But he real . . .
Next in the stanza, Frost says oh, I kept the first for another day!/Yet knowing how way leads on to way,/I doubted if I should ever come back. He will continue on the road that he chose and he will never come to the same place where those same two roads diverged. The fact that the traveler chooses the less travled path over the more travled indicates the personality type of the traveler. The Road Not Taken represents a choice in a single moment in a lifetime. It is impossible to fortell the consequences of most of the major decisions we make and it is often necessary to make these decisions based on little more than examining which choice wanted wear. No matter how hard or long the speaker ponders which road to take, he won't be able to predict the future. Perhaps, Frost does this because each time a person comes to the point where they have a decision to make, the situation seems new to them. He starts the next stanza with,And both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black. At the beginning they probably appear to be similar, but miles away, they will grow farther and farther away from each other, similar to many choices we are faced with in life. The traveler seeks to be unique and go against the grain of society. The next stanza starts with,Then took the other, as just as fair,/And having perhaps the better claim, because it was grassy and wanted wear. Although the two roads in the poem are diverging, they lead in different directions. The road that the man took was obviously not for everyone because it seemed to him that the majority of the people took the other path.
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