The Road Not Taken

5 Pages 1268 Words

The Road Not Taken

I decided to do “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost. When people read the poem without any other interpretation or knowledge of it the most popular interpretation is that Frost is talking about his own life in this poem. I was convinced that was the case until I decided to do this paper.
I will be focusing on what appears to be very obvious in the poem but after looking a little deeper is untrue. That portion I am talking about is the sigh in the fourth stanza of the poem. A simple sigh out of someone’s mouth could be interpreted many ways. It could be tension, a thought, or just exhaling from a deep breath. In the poem “The Road Not Taken”, by Robert Frost, many argue as to what the ‘sigh’ towards the end of the poem actually means. Some think it is a shift of tone in the poem, others say that it signifies that he is unhappy about the road that he has taken in his life. Little do they know, they are all very wrong. In fact, the poem is not written about Frost at all. This shows the simple ways that a poem can easily be misinterpreted. The history of why a poem was written can dramatically change the meaning of a poem and the way that it is read. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is a great example.
The literal meaning of this poem by Robert Frost is pretty obvious. A traveler comes to a fork in the road and needs to decide which way to go to continue his journey. After much thought, the traveler picks the road "less traveled by." The poem describes the tough choices people make when traveling the road of life. The traveler regrets leaving the road he has already passed by and realizes that he probably won’t travel that same way again. I’m sure many of us could compare similar instances in their own lives to the one Frost describes in the poem.
Robert Frost began writing “The Road Not Taken” in England in 1914, and completed it in Franconia before his first publ...