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Choices InThe Road Not Taken, By Robert Frost

Decent Essays

Life is teeming with choices. Starting the moment one is born and until their time of death, people have to make constant choices everyday. Life can be imagined as a long, tortuous highway that has countless other roads branching off in several directions. A human's existence is too short to test every road. Ultimately, the choices we make affect every outcome in life. In the poems, “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, there is a similar theme that depicts the challenges that humans face throughout their lives. Both of these poems use similar literary techniques to present the struggle the speaker has to face when making decisions. Once a path is chosen, one cannot turn back and erase the experiences that occurred along the way.
The poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, uses many different poetic devices to convey the challenge of choice. One device used in the poem is metaphor. In life, we are given several choices. Some of these choices are harder than others, and ultimately, we make the decision on which route to pursue. The speaker of the poem is brought to a fork in the road; one road is overgrown while the other is worn and walked over. This serves as an extended metaphor for the common path taken in life versus the less common path. As we are faced with decisions, the fear of change and of the unknown causes the majority of people stay in conformity without attempting to step out of it, as we are shown by the worn

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