38 pages • 1 hour read
Robert FrostThe Road Not Taken
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Themes
The (Ir)relevancy of Choice
In many ways, “The Road Not Taken” is a young adult’s poem. The poem’s slender narrative explores a moment of choice, do this or do that, the moment the path a person travels suddenly offers a choice and requires a decision. If the metaphor applies to something greater than picking one’s way in the woods, the thematic implications are at once inspirational and unsettling. Given that the critical high-stakes decisions that a person makes to direct their life-narrative are made under the age of 30, often much sooner, the poem speaks most directly to that demographic, twenty-somethings who must continually confront forks in the road of their life. These are not the trivial choices people make daily—what to eat, when to go to sleep, what program to watch—but rather the kind of once-in-a-lifetime decisions. After all, the hiker intones, “I doubted if I should ever come back” (Line 15).
Yet Frost was in his forties at the time of the poem’s composition. That disparity gifts the poem with its brittle irony. The poem confronts the perplexing, very human dilemma that people want their lives to matter, that they need to believe that the choices they make matter and that those same choices are made with insight, perspicuity, and confidence, that a person boldly sorts through possible lives to select, in a meaningful gesture of will, the life and the person they want to be. Frost is too old for that sentimental fantasy. Either road, even the hiker acknowledges, is the same. Choose without the gaudy and self-aggrandizing drama of Look Out World, Here I Come, the happy blather of commencement speeches. No one knows what the outcome of such purportedly grand decisions might be. One choice is not better, or worse, just different. That logic, at once harshly ironic and gently compassionate, even reassuring, undermines the concept of the importance of choice. The reality is that the hiker must make choices, the hiker cannot diddle at the fork in the road forever. Ultimately, for the over-arching narrator if not the fretting hiker agonizing over which way to go, choice is both everything and nothing. Regret in the end is a fool’s game.
The Consolations of the Intellect
The hiker acknowledges that the paths he might choose are in fact the same and yet closes the poem reassuring himself that he can in retrospect make the choice whatever he deems he needs, wise or foolish, smart or tragic, rewarding or self-destructive. It is not the choice itself but rather the power of the intellect to render that decision into virtually any life-narrative.
Key to the power of the intellect to repurposed any life decision into either folly or wisdom is the sigh the hiker says will someday accompany his retelling of his moment in the woods (Line 16). The sigh is a noncommittal emotional response that covers contradictory readings. Indeed, a sigh is a sign that says everything and nothing. It can signal profound and unshakeable regret, or it can signal satisfaction and contentment, or it can signal a deep and inexplicable ambivalence. The mind can make of a life what it needs it to be, heroic, tragic, or existentially empty.
The closing stanza indicates how ready the hiker himself is to spin facts. He is prepared to say he took the road less traveled by, went his own way along a path that was dangerous, riskier, uncertain, that required courage to choose. None of this jells with the narrative he shares in the opening two stanzas. He is prepared to lie to himself, that the path he chose defined his character when, as he acknowledges, that was simply not the case. The poem refuses to gift that choice with any significant repercussions: “[T]hat [choice] has made all the difference” (line 20). Do you want tragedy and regret? The intellect can do that. Do you want the deep reward and satisfactions of a life well-lived? The intellect can do that as well. You want to stew in existential angst and cling to a cloaking despair, the intellect can do that. Leave it to the gentle ministrations of the intellect to shape those careless, clumsy, rash choices the heart makes into a life-narrative that will ultimately make sense, abide by a logic it simply does not have, and provide a reassuring sense of inevitability and causality, the very things that the decision itself at the time it was made lacked.
The Didactic Power of Nature
Nature comforts, nature illuminates, nature resonates with an energy that humanity needs—these have been the assumptions nature poets before Frost made for centuries. The poem positions the main character in the woods, in the heart of nature. After all, the argument the poem makes about choices in life could have as easily been made at the crossroads of streets in a city or in the aisles of department stores. Poets since the Romantics more than a century before Frost have embraced nature as a heightened expression of not only physical but spiritual beauty, a comforting refuge from the noise and bustling commotion of the ever-sprawling urban world.
Given the poem’s coaxing folksy tone, the expectations might be that nature provides a similar sanctuary, a place to reanimate, recharge, reflect, and return stronger. Frost is too much a Modernist, too much aware of the advances in science to allow nature the same spiritual aura that earlier nature poets exalted. Nature is no welcoming retreat. The hiker is uncertain where to go, where he is. The woods do not reassure him but rather tease him, goad him, even terrorize him. The path simply, without warning splits, cleanly, quietly, and without irony. In this way, nature has been repurposed into not a sanctuary but rather a stark and obvious metaphor for an existential vision of contemporary life. There is no escape into the generous arms of nature. There is no Judeo-Christian overlay that would render the woods inviting and instructive. The woods and the path, stern but honest teachers, tell the hiker what he needs to know but that he refuses to accept about life itself: the split paths are exactly the same, that those worrisome big decisions in the end mean nothing.
Related Titles
By Robert Frost
