"The Road Not Taken" is perhaps the most studied poems of all time. Scholars and students alike have spent countless hours pouring over the mere twenty lines of verse. Yet, despite all the pondering and all the effort put forth, there has never been one fully accepted interpretation of the poem (or any poem, for that matter). The most common interpretation asserts that the speaker is recalling an important decision he made in his past with nostalgia and pride. However, I contend that another interpretation is more feasible. My interpretation of "The Road Not Taken" states that the speaker is not telling a story about making a right decision years ago but rather that he is trying to rationalize that his decision was not merely a guess.
             As the poem begins, the reader is presented with a narrative of events from the past. The first stanza sets the scene for the narration. As "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" a lone walker comes upon a fork in the path and is left to decide which path to take, much the same as travelers on the road of life must do. The speaker's immediate instinct is to look for a reason to choose one path over another. He is "sorry" he could not travel both but is in a situation where a decision has to be made. The speaker chooses one path over the other initially stating that he did so because one "was grassy and wanted wear". However, two lines later, the speaker retracts that statement saying the two paths were "really about the same". To me, this contradiction suggest that the choices the writer has made in his life were fairly arbitrary and that his fate was determined by luck.
             The speaker in "The Road Not Taken" attempts to delude himself that he will be back to try the first path. Frost writes, "I kept the first [path] for another day." Even so, the speaker knows that he will not be back. In fact, he states that he "doubted" if he "should ever come bac
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