This has got to be among the best-known, most-often-misunderstood poems on the planet. It seems as if "The Road Not Taken" gets memorized without really being read. This is a type of poem that needs to be read with accuracy, not imagination. If you read the poem and really try to understand the meaning of each word, its plain to see what the poem is talking about. It seems to me that most people believe the poem is about how a man took a path in life that not many people take, and has had a great life because of it. When you break it down and read the lines separately, its easy to understand what the poem is really about - how you will always wonder what could have been.
             In line 9, of the two roads the poem reads "the passing there Had worn them really about the same." In fact, both roads "that morning lay In leaves no step had trodden black." Meaning: Neither of the roads is less traveled by. I do not believe the poem is about how the man chose the right path; instead I believe it is about how he will always wonder what would have happened had he taken a different route.
             Ironic as it is, this is also a poem infused with the expectation of regret. Its title is not "The Road Less Traveled" but "The Road Not Taken." Even as the character makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if does not want to stand forever in the woods, and for this choice he has no real guide or basis for decision-making), the reader knows that he will second-guess himself somewhere down the line - or at the very least he will wonder at what is forever lost: the impossible, unknowable Other Path. The character will never know what could have been, he will always wonder about decisions that he could have changed and other things he could have accomplished. But the nature of the decision is such that there is no right path - just the chosen path and the other path. What are sighed for ages and ages hence are not so m
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