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Robert Frost The Road Not Taken Essay

Decent Essays

Due to its imagery and style Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has become a poem that is studied in high school literature. Since its publication multitudes of readers have analyzed Frost’s poem as a sentimental commentary of the choices made in life. The narrator decided to seize the day and express himself as an individual by deciding to take the road that was “less traveled.” This poem is exceedingly popular because almost every reader can understand the narrator’s decision. Having to choose between two paths without having any knowledge of where either road will lead. One of the attractions of the poem is its archetypal predicament. One that we can almost immediately recognize and relate to because each of us encounters it countless times in our lives, both in a literal sense …show more content…

Our route is, thus, determined by an accretion of choice and chance, and it is impossible to separate the two. The poem isn’t giving the reader advice. It does not say, “When individuals come to a fork in the road, investigate the footprints and take the road less traveled by” Frost’s focus is more complex. Moreover, the narrator’s decision to choose the “less traveled” path demonstrates his courage. Instead of taking the safer path that more people have traveled, the narrator prefers to make his own impact upon the world. Nonetheless, when we look closer at the text of the poem, it becomes clear that such an idealistic analysis is largely inaccurate. Next, the poem seems more attentive with the question of how the detailed present (yellow woods, grassy roads coated in forsaken leaves) will look multiple years after he has traveled the path that he chose. The narrator only characterizes the paths from one another after he has already chosen a path and traveled multiple years through life. When he first comes upon the fork in the road, the paths are described as being essentially

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