More House SchoolEnglish DepartmentLITB1 Robert Frost

Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken

What’s the story?

The speaker is out for a walk (sound familiar?) and this time it is not a ‘gray’ day (as it was in ‘The Wood Pile’) but rather a yellow one. That is to say, it is Autumn. Nor is walking on a frozen marsh; this time he is wandering around in a wood. The path he is following splits into two, and he thinks that he’d like to walk down both. He can’t though, as he is subject to the laws of space and time, like the rest of us, and so he stops walking and has a good old think about which one to pick. In the end, he picks the one ‘less travelled by’, telling himself that he can always return another day and go down the other one, but knowing that this is highly unlikely.

We are not told about the consequences of choosing the path he does. Frost ends ambiguously, stating that ‘it has made all the difference’ but offering us nothing in the way of how, exactly.

Essay Questions

You should answer at least one of the questions below.

1. “Some have called me a nature poet, because of the background, but I’m not a nature poet. There’s always something else in my poetry” Faggen, 109. What, in your opinion, is the ‘something else’ in ‘The Road Not Taken’?

2. “Take” suggests less of a “choice” as rational decision than something seized upon… What appeared to be choice or selection turned out to be less rational than we would like it to be. Faggen, 142. What does this poem suggest about the way we make choices in life? (You may wish to look at Frost’s poem ‘The Sound of Trees’, below.)

3. Robert Faggen suggests that ‘The Road Not Taken’ is an ‘itinerant journey poem’ (Faggen, 147).In what ways does the poem take us on a journey?

4. Frost said that ‘Metaphor is the whole of poetry’ and that ‘Poetry is simply made of metaphor’. Explore the metaphors in ‘The Road Not Taken’.

5. Compare ‘The Road Not Taken’ with Frost’s poem ‘The Sound of Trees’, below:

The Sound of Trees I wonder about the trees.Why do we wish to bearForever the noise of theseMore than another noiseSo close to our dwelling place?We suffer them by the dayTill we lose all measure of pace,And fixity in our joys,And acquire a listening air.They are that that talks of goingBut never gets away;And that talks no less for knowing,

As it grows wiser and older,That now it means to stay.My feet tug at the floorAnd my head sways to my shoulderSometimes when I watch trees sway,From the window or the door.I shall set forth for somewhere,I shall make the reckless choiceSome day when they are in voiceAnd tossing so as to scareThe white clouds over them on.I shall have less to say,But I shall be gone.

6. ‘Two paths diverged in a yellow wood...’In what ways does setting contribute to ‘The Road Not Taken’?

7. Frost said that his poems offer no clear or singular ‘meaning’ or ‘conclusion’, but, rather, ‘are all set to trip the reader head foremost into the boundless’. In what ways does ‘The Road Not Taken’ resist any one ‘meaning’?

8. In his essay ‘Poetry and School’, Frost remarks: “Poetry plays the rhythms of dramatic speech on the grid of meter.” Explore Frost’s use of rhythm and meter in ‘The Road Not Taken’.

Except where otherwise stated, all quotations are from The Cambridge Introduction to Robert Frost, Robert Faggen, CUP, 2008