The road not taken - Robert Frost

“The Road Not Taken”

Complete Text

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood

And sorry I could not travel both 

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5 

Then took the other, as just as fair

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that, the passing there

Had worn them really about the same, 10 

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back. 15 

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference. 20 

Summary

The speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid

with un-trodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day. Yet he

knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will

recreate the scene with a slight twist: He will claim that he took the less-traveled road.

Form

“The Road Not Taken” consists of four stanzas of five lines. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB; the rhymes are strict

and masculine, with the notable exception of the last line (we do not usually stress the -ence ofdifference). There

are four stressed syllables per line, varying on an iambic tetrameter base.

Commentary

This has got to be among the best-known, most-often-misunderstood poems on the planet. Several generations

of careless readers have turned it into a piece of Hallmark happy-graduation-son, seize-the-future puffery.

Cursed with a perfect marriage of form and content, arresting phrase wrought from simple words, and resonant

metaphor, it seems as if “The Road Not Taken” gets memorized without really being read. For this it has died the

cliché’s un-death of trivial immortality.

But you yourself can resurrect it from zombie-hood by reading it—not with imagination, even, but simply with

accuracy. Of the two roads the speaker says “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same.” In fact,

both roads “that morning lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” Meaning:Neither of the roads is less

traveled by. These are the facts; we cannot justifiably ignore the reverberations they send through the easy

aphorisms of the last two stanzas.

One of the attractions of the poem is its archetypal dilemma, one that we instantly recognize because each of us

encounters it innumerable times, both literally and figuratively. Paths in the woods and forks in roads are ancient

and deep-seated metaphors for the lifeline, its crises and decisions. Identical forks, in particular, symbolize for us

the nexus of free will and fate: We are free to choose, but we do not really know beforehand what we are

choosing between. Our route is, thus, determined by an accretion of choice and chance, and it is impossible to

separate the two.

This poem does not advise. It does not say, “When you come to a fork in the road, study the footprints and take

the road less traveled by” (or even, as Yogi Berra enigmatically quipped, “When you come to a fork in the road,

take it”). Frost’s focus is more complicated. First, there is no less-traveled road in this poem; it isn’t even an

option. Next, the poem seems more concerned with the question of how the concrete present (yellow woods,

grassy roads covered in fallen leaves) will look from a future vantage point.

The ironic tone is inescapable: “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence.” The

speaker anticipates his own future insincerity—his need, later on in life, to rearrange the facts and inject a dose

of Lone Ranger into the account. He knows that he will be inaccurate, at best, or hypocritical, at worst, when he

holds his life up as an example. In fact, he predicts that his future self will betray this moment of decision as if the

betrayal were inevitable. This realization is ironic and poignantly pathetic. But the “sigh” is critical. The speaker

will not, in his old age, merely gather the youth about him and say, “Do what I did, kiddies. I stuck to my guns,

took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” Rather, he may say this, but he will sigh

first; for he won’t believe it himself. Somewhere in the back of his mind will remain the image of yellow woods and

two equally leafy paths.

Ironic as it is, this is also a poem infused with the anticipation of remorse. Its title is not “The Road Less Traveled”

but “The Road Not Taken.” Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if does not want to stand

forever in the woods, one for which he has no real guide or definitive basis for decision-making), the speaker

knows that he will second-guess himself somewhere down the line—or at the very least he will wonder at what is

irrevocably lost: the impossible, unknowable Other Path. But the nature of the decision is such that there is no

Right Path—just the chosen path and the other path. What are sighed for ages and ages hence are not so much

the wrong decisions as the moments of decision themselves—moments that, one atop the other, mark the

passing of a life. This is the more primal strain of remorse.

Thus, to add a further level of irony, the theme of the poem may, after all, be “seize the day.” But a more

nuanced carpe diem, if you please.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Youth and the Loss of Innocence

Youth appears prominently in Frost’s poetry, particularly in connection with innocence and its loss. A Boy’s

Will deals with this theme explicitly, tracing the development of a solitary youth as he explores and questions the

world around him. Frost’s later work depicts youth as an idealized, edenic state full of possibility and opportunity.

But as his poetic tone became increasingly jaded and didactic, he imagines youth as a time of unchecked

freedom that is taken for granted and then lost. The theme of lost innocence becomes particularly poignant for

Frost after the horrors of World War I and World War II, in which he witnessed the physical and psychic wounding

of entire generations of young people. Later poems, including “Birches” (1916), “Acquainted with the Night”

(1928), and “Desert Places” (1936), explore the realities of aging and loss, contrasting adult experiences with

the carefree pleasures of youth.

Self-Knowledge Through Nature

Nature figures prominently in Frost’s poetry, and his poems usually include a moment of interaction or encounter

between a humanspeaker and a natural subject or phenomenon. These encounters culminate in profound

realizations or revelations, which have significant consequences for the speakers. Actively engaging with nature

—whether through manual labor or exploration—has a variety of results, including self-knowledge, deeper

understanding of the human condition, and increased insight into the metaphysical world. Frost’s earlier work

focuses on the act of discovery and demonstrates how being engaged with nature leads to growth and

knowledge. For instance, a day of harvesting fruit leads to a new understanding of life’s final sleep, or death, in

“After Apple-Picking” (1915). Mid-career, however, Frost used encounters in nature to comment on the human

condition. In his later works, experiencing nature provided access to the universal, the supernatural, and the

divine, even as the poems themselves became increasingly focused on aging and mortality.

Throughout Frost’s work, speakers learn about themselves by exploring nature, but nature always stays

indifferent to the human world. In other words, people learn from nature because nature allows people to gain

knowledge about themselves and because nature requires people to reach for new insights, but nature itself

does not provide answers. Frost believed in the capacity of humans to achieve feats of understanding in natural

settings, but he also believed that nature was unconcerned with either human achievement or human misery.

Indeed, in Frost’s work, nature could be both generous and malicious. The speaker of “Design” (1936), for

example, wonders about the “design of darkness” (13) that has led a spider to kill a moth over the course of a

night. While humans might learn about themselves through nature, nature and its ways remain mysterious.

Community vs. Isolation

Frost marveled at the contrast between the human capacity to connect with one another and to experience

feelings of profound isolation. In several Frost poems, solitary individuals wander through a natural setting and

encounter another individual, an object, or an animal. These encounters stimulate moments of revelation in which

the speaker realizes her or his connection to others or, conversely, the ways that she or he feels isolated from

the community. Earlier poems feature speakers who actively choose solitude and isolation in order to learn more

about themselves, but these speakers ultimately discover a firm connection to the world around them, as in “The

Tufts of Flowers” (1915) and “Mending Wall” (1915). Longer dramatic poems explore how people isolate

themselves even within social contexts. Later poems return the focus to solitude, exploring how encounters and

community only heighten loneliness and isolation. This deeply pessimistic, almost misanthropic perspective

sneaks into the most cheerful of late Frost poems, including “Acquainted with the Night” and “Desert Places.”

Motifs

Manual Labor

Labor functions as a tool for self-analysis and discovery in Frost’s poetry. Work allows his speakers to

understand themselves and the world around them. Traditionally, pastoral and romantic poets emphasized a

passive relationship with nature, wherein people would achieve understanding and knowledge by observing and

meditating, not by directly interacting with the natural world. In contrast, Frost’s speakers work, labor, and act—

mending fences, as in “Mending Wall”; harvesting fruit, as in “After Apple-Picking”; or cutting hay, as in “Mowing”

(1915). Even children work, although the hard labor of the little boy in “Out, Out—” (1920) leads to his death.

The boy’s death implies that while work was necessary for adults, children should be exempted from difficult

labor until they have attained the required maturity with which to handle both the physical and the mental stress

that goes along with rural life. Frost implies that a connection with the earth and with one’s self can only be

achieved by actively communing with the natural world through work.

New England

Long considered the quintessential regional poet, Frost uses New England as a recurring setting throughout his

work. Although he spent his early life in California, Frost moved to the East Coast in his early teens and spent the

majority of his adult life in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The region’s landscape, history, culture, and

attitudes fill his poetry, and he emphasizes local color and natural elements of the forests, orchards, fields, and

small towns. His speakers wander through dense woods and snowstorms, pick apples, and climb

mountains. North of Boston, the title of Frost’s second collection of poetry, firmly established him as the

chronicler of small-town, rural life in New England. Frost found inspiration in his day-to-day experiences, basing

“Mending Wall,” for instance, on a fence near his farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and “The Oven Bird” (1920) on

birds indigenous to the nearby woods.

The Sound of Sense

Frost coined the phrase the sound of sense to emphasize thepoetic diction, or word choice, used throughout his

work. According to letters he wrote in1913 and 1914, the sound of sense should be positive, as well as

proactive, and should resemble everyday speech. To achieve the sound of sense, Frost chose words for tone

and sound, in addition to considering each word’s meaning. Many poems replicate content through

rhyme, meter, and alliteration. For instance, “Mowing” captures the back-and-forth sound of a scythe swinging,

while “Out, Out—” imitates the jerky, noisy roar of a buzz saw. Believing that poetry should be recited, rather than

read, Frost not only paid attention to the sound of his poems but also went on speaking tours throughout the

United States, where he would read, comment, and discuss his work. Storytelling has a long history in the United

States, particularly in New England, and Frost wanted to tap into this history to emphasize poetry as an oral art.

Symbols

Trees

Trees delineate borders in Frost’s poetry. They not only mark boundaries on earth, such as that between a

pasture and a forest, but also boundaries between earth and heaven. In some poems, such as “After Apple-

Picking” and “Birches,” trees are the link between earth, or humanity, and the sky, or the divine. Trees function as

boundary spaces, where moments of connection or revelation become possible. Humans can observe and think

critically about humanity and the divine under the shade of these trees or standing nearby, inside the trees’

boundary space. Forests and edges of forests function similarly as boundary spaces, as in “Into My Own” (1915)

or “Desert Places.” Finally, trees acts as boundaries or borders between different areas or types of experiences.

When Frost’s speakers and subjects are near the edge of a forest, wandering in a forest, or climbing a tree, they

exist in liminal spaces, halfway between the earth and the sky, which allow the speakers to engage with nature

and experience moments of revelation.

Birds and Birdsong

In Frost’s poetry, birds represent nature, and their songs represent nature’s attitudes toward humanity. Birds

provide a voice for the natural world to communicate with humans. But their songs communicate only nature’s

indifference toward the human world, as in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” (1923) and “Never

Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” (1942). Their beautiful melodies belie an absence of feeling for humanity

and our situations. Nevertheless, as a part of nature, birds have a right to their song, even if it annoys or

distresses human listeners. In “A Minor Bird” (1928), the speaker eventually realizes that all songs must

continue to exist, whether those songs are found in nature, as with birds, or in culture, as with poems. Frost also

uses birds and birdsong to symbolize poetry, and birds become a medium through which to comment on the

efficacy of poetry as a tool of emotional expression, as in “The Oven Bird” (1920).

Solitary Travelers

Solitary travelers appear frequently in Frost’s poems, and their attitudes toward their journeys and their

surroundings highlight poetic and historical themes, including the figure of the wanderer and the changing social

landscape of New England in the twentieth century. As in romanticism, a literary movement active in England

from roughly 1750 to 1830, Frost’s poetry demonstrates great respect for the social outcast, or wanderer, who

exists on the fringes of a community. Like the romanticized notion of the solitary traveler, the poet was also

separated from the community, which allowed him to view social interactions, as well as the natural world, with a

sense of wonder, fear, and admiration. Able to engage with his surroundings using fresh eyes, the solitary

traveler simultaneously exists as a part of the landscape and as an observer of the landscape. Found in

“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923), “Into My Own,” “Acquainted with the Night,” and “The Road

Not Taken” (1920), among other poems, the solitary traveler demonstrates the historical and regional context of

Frost’s poetry. In the early twentieth century, the development of transportation and industry created the social

type of the wandering “tramp,” who lived a transient lifestyle, looking for work in a rapidly developing industrial

society. Like Frost’s speakers and subjects, these people lived on the outskirts of the community, largely away

from the warmth and complexity of human interaction.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Youth and the Loss of Innocence

Youth appears prominently in Frost’s poetry, particularly in connection with innocence and its loss. A Boy’s

Will deals with this theme explicitly, tracing the development of a solitary youth as he explores and questions the

world around him. Frost’s later work depicts youth as an idealized, edenic state full of possibility and opportunity.

But as his poetic tone became increasingly jaded and didactic, he imagines youth as a time of unchecked

freedom that is taken for granted and then lost. The theme of lost innocence becomes particularly poignant for

Frost after the horrors of World War I and World War II, in which he witnessed the physical and psychic wounding

of entire generations of young people. Later poems, including “Birches” (1916), “Acquainted with the Night”

(1928), and “Desert Places” (1936), explore the realities of aging and loss, contrasting adult experiences with

the carefree pleasures of youth.

Self-Knowledge Through Nature

Nature figures prominently in Frost’s poetry, and his poems usually include a moment of interaction or encounter

between a humanspeaker and a natural subject or phenomenon. These encounters culminate in profound

realizations or revelations, which have significant consequences for the speakers. Actively engaging with nature

—whether through manual labor or exploration—has a variety of results, including self-knowledge, deeper

understanding of the human condition, and increased insight into the metaphysical world. Frost’s earlier work

focuses on the act of discovery and demonstrates how being engaged with nature leads to growth and

knowledge. For instance, a day of harvesting fruit leads to a new understanding of life’s final sleep, or death, in

“After Apple-Picking” (1915). Mid-career, however, Frost used encounters in nature to comment on the human

condition. In his later works, experiencing nature provided access to the universal, the supernatural, and the

divine, even as the poems themselves became increasingly focused on aging and mortality.

Throughout Frost’s work, speakers learn about themselves by exploring nature, but nature always stays

indifferent to the human world. In other words, people learn from nature because nature allows people to gain

knowledge about themselves and because nature requires people to reach for new insights, but nature itself

does not provide answers. Frost believed in the capacity of humans to achieve feats of understanding in natural

settings, but he also believed that nature was unconcerned with either human achievement or human misery.

Indeed, in Frost’s work, nature could be both generous and malicious. The speaker of “Design” (1936), for

example, wonders about the “design of darkness” (13) that has led a spider to kill a moth over the course of a

night. While humans might learn about themselves through nature, nature and its ways remain mysterious.

Community vs. Isolation

Frost marveled at the contrast between the human capacity to connect with one another and to experience

feelings of profound isolation. In several Frost poems, solitary individuals wander through a natural setting and

encounter another individual, an object, or an animal. These encounters stimulate moments of revelation in which

the speaker realizes her or his connection to others or, conversely, the ways that she or he feels isolated from

the community. Earlier poems feature speakers who actively choose solitude and isolation in order to learn more

about themselves, but these speakers ultimately discover a firm connection to the world around them, as in “The

Tufts of Flowers” (1915) and “Mending Wall” (1915). Longer dramatic poems explore how people isolate

themselves even within social contexts. Later poems return the focus to solitude, exploring how encounters and

community only heighten loneliness and isolation. This deeply pessimistic, almost misanthropic perspective

sneaks into the most cheerful of late Frost poems, including “Acquainted with the Night” and “Desert Places.”

Motifs

Manual Labor

Labor functions as a tool for self-analysis and discovery in Frost’s poetry. Work allows his speakers to

understand themselves and the world around them. Traditionally, pastoral and romantic poets emphasized a

passive relationship with nature, wherein people would achieve understanding and knowledge by observing and

meditating, not by directly interacting with the natural world. In contrast, Frost’s speakers work, labor, and act—

mending fences, as in “Mending Wall”; harvesting fruit, as in “After Apple-Picking”; or cutting hay, as in “Mowing”

(1915). Even children work, although the hard labor of the little boy in “Out, Out—” (1920) leads to his death.

The boy’s death implies that while work was necessary for adults, children should be exempted from difficult

labor until they have attained the required maturity with which to handle both the physical and the mental stress

that goes along with rural life. Frost implies that a connection with the earth and with one’s self can only be

achieved by actively communing with the natural world through work.

New England

Long considered the quintessential regional poet, Frost uses New England as a recurring setting throughout his

work. Although he spent his early life in California, Frost moved to the East Coast in his early teens and spent the

majority of his adult life in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The region’s landscape, history, culture, and

attitudes fill his poetry, and he emphasizes local color and natural elements of the forests, orchards, fields, and

small towns. His speakers wander through dense woods and snowstorms, pick apples, and climb

mountains. North of Boston, the title of Frost’s second collection of poetry, firmly established him as the

chronicler of small-town, rural life in New England. Frost found inspiration in his day-to-day experiences, basing

“Mending Wall,” for instance, on a fence near his farm in Derry, New Hampshire, and “The Oven Bird” (1920) on

birds indigenous to the nearby woods.

The Sound of Sense

Frost coined the phrase the sound of sense to emphasize thepoetic diction, or word choice, used throughout his

work. According to letters he wrote in1913 and 1914, the sound of sense should be positive, as well as

proactive, and should resemble everyday speech. To achieve the sound of sense, Frost chose words for tone

and sound, in addition to considering each word’s meaning. Many poems replicate content through

rhyme, meter, and alliteration. For instance, “Mowing” captures the back-and-forth sound of a scythe swinging,

while “Out, Out—” imitates the jerky, noisy roar of a buzz saw. Believing that poetry should be recited, rather than

read, Frost not only paid attention to the sound of his poems but also went on speaking tours throughout the

United States, where he would read, comment, and discuss his work. Storytelling has a long history in the United

States, particularly in New England, and Frost wanted to tap into this history to emphasize poetry as an oral art.

Symbols

Trees

Trees delineate borders in Frost’s poetry. They not only mark boundaries on earth, such as that between a

pasture and a forest, but also boundaries between earth and heaven. In some poems, such as “After Apple-

Picking” and “Birches,” trees are the link between earth, or humanity, and the sky, or the divine. Trees function as

boundary spaces, where moments of connection or revelation become possible. Humans can observe and think

critically about humanity and the divine under the shade of these trees or standing nearby, inside the trees’

boundary space. Forests and edges of forests function similarly as boundary spaces, as in “Into My Own” (1915)

or “Desert Places.” Finally, trees acts as boundaries or borders between different areas or types of experiences.

When Frost’s speakers and subjects are near the edge of a forest, wandering in a forest, or climbing a tree, they

exist in liminal spaces, halfway between the earth and the sky, which allow the speakers to engage with nature

and experience moments of revelation.

Birds and Birdsong

In Frost’s poetry, birds represent nature, and their songs represent nature’s attitudes toward humanity. Birds

provide a voice for the natural world to communicate with humans. But their songs communicate only nature’s

indifference toward the human world, as in “The Need of Being Versed in Country Things” (1923) and “Never

Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same” (1942). Their beautiful melodies belie an absence of feeling for humanity

and our situations. Nevertheless, as a part of nature, birds have a right to their song, even if it annoys or

distresses human listeners. In “A Minor Bird” (1928), the speaker eventually realizes that all songs must

continue to exist, whether those songs are found in nature, as with birds, or in culture, as with poems. Frost also

uses birds and birdsong to symbolize poetry, and birds become a medium through which to comment on the

efficacy of poetry as a tool of emotional expression, as in “The Oven Bird” (1920).

Solitary Travelers

Solitary travelers appear frequently in Frost’s poems, and their attitudes toward their journeys and their

surroundings highlight poetic and historical themes, including the figure of the wanderer and the changing social

landscape of New England in the twentieth century. As in romanticism, a literary movement active in England

from roughly 1750 to 1830, Frost’s poetry demonstrates great respect for the social outcast, or wanderer, who

exists on the fringes of a community. Like the romanticized notion of the solitary traveler, the poet was also

separated from the community, which allowed him to view social interactions, as well as the natural world, with a

sense of wonder, fear, and admiration. Able to engage with his surroundings using fresh eyes, the solitary

traveler simultaneously exists as a part of the landscape and as an observer of the landscape. Found in

“Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening” (1923), “Into My Own,” “Acquainted with the Night,” and “The Road

Not Taken” (1920), among other poems, the solitary traveler demonstrates the historical and regional context of

Frost’s poetry. In the early twentieth century, the development of transportation and industry created the social

type of the wandering “tramp,” who lived a transient lifestyle, looking for work in a rapidly developing industrial

society. Like Frost’s speakers and subjects, these people lived on the outskirts of the community, largely away

from the warmth and complexity of human interaction.

1 . In what ways do the characters in “Home Burial” misunderstand each other?

To the wife, the husband’s act of burying the child was one of supreme indifference, while to him it must have been one of supreme suffering—an attempt to convince himself, through physical labor, that the death of a child is part of the natural order of things; or an act of self-punishment, a penance to be preformed befitting the horror of the loss; or simply a way of steeping himself in his grief, of forcing it into the muscles of his arms and back, of feeling it in the dirt on his clothes. The wife completely fails to grasp the meaning of her husband’s words: When he says, “ ‘Three foggy mornings and one rainy day / Will rot the best birch fence a man can build,’ ” she takes his words as literal, inappropriate comments on fence building; she is indisposed to see her husband’s form of grieving as acceptable. Yet his words have everything to do with the little body in the darkened parlor. He is talking about death, about the futility of man’s efforts, about fortune and misfortune, about the unfairness of fate and nature. And yet, how easy it would be for the man to explain himself to his wife when she accuses him of heartlessness. If he had any understanding of how to communicate to her, he would not leave everything unspoken. He would make some concession to her needs and articulate a brief defense. “You misunderstand,” he might say. “When I said that, it was because that was the only way I could say anything at all about our loss.” Instead, he lets her accusations float in the air, as if they were just hysteria and nonsense, and not worth gainsaying. This displays a lack of empathy and a failure of communication as fatal as the wife’s. When she describes his heartless act of grave digging, he says only, “I shall laugh the worst laugh I ever laughed. / I’m cursed. God, if I don’t believe I’m cursed.” This leaves her free to believe that he accepts her accusation, that the curse refers to his hard-heartedness and not the terribly irony of her misinterpretation. He uses irony where she requires clarity. She needs him to admit to agony, and he can grant her no more than veiled references to a substratum of unspoken grief. And in the face of her grief’s obvious persistence, he makes a callous—or, at the very least, extremely counterproductive—remark: “I do think, though, you overdo it a little.”

2 . Discuss the anticipation or remorse in “The Road Not Taken.”

There is a fair amount of irony to be found here, but this is also a poem infused with the anticipation of remorse. Its title is not “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.” Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if he does not want to stand forever in the woods, one for which he has no real guide or definitive basis for decision-making), the speaker knows that he will second-guess himself somewhere down the line—or at the very least he will wonder at what is irrevocably lost: the impossible, unknowable Other Path. But the nature of the decision is such that there is no Right Path—just the chosen path and the other path. The Road Less Traveled is a fiction the speaker will later invent, an attempt to polarize his past and give himself, retroactively,

more agency than he really had. What are sighed for ages and ages hence are not so much the wrong decisions as the moments of decision themselves—moments that, one atop the other, mark the passing of a life. This is the more primal str

3 . What is ironic about the speaker’s statements concerning his neighbor’s opinion of wall-building in “Mending Wall”?ain of remorse.

The speaker may scorn his neighbor’s obstinate wall-building, may observe the activity with humorous detachment, but he himself goes to the wall at all times of the year to mend the damage done by hunters. And it is the speaker who contacts the neighbor at wall-mending time to set the annual appointment. Which person, then, is the true wall-builder? The speaker says he sees no need for a wall here, but this implies that there may be a need for a wall elsewhere— “where there are cows,” for example. Yet the speaker must derive something, some use, some satisfaction, out of the exercise of wall-building, or why would he initiate it here? There is something in him that does love a wall or at least the act of making a wall. One source of irony lies in an observation the poem makes indirectly: What seems an act of anti-social self-confinement (wall-building) can, in fact, be interpreted as an important social gesture. The ritual of wall maintenance highlights the dual and complementary nature of human society: The rights of the individual (property boundaries, proper boundaries) are affirmed through the affirmation of other individuals’ rights; it demonstrates another benefit of community, for this communal act, this civic “game,” offers a good excuse for the speaker to interact with his neighbor. One senses that the two men don’t spend much time together outside of this yearly chore. Wall-building can be seen, ironically, as highly social—both in the sense of “societal” and “sociable.” He are forced to ask ourselves whether the speaker might not, in fact, believe his neighbor’s proverb about good fences.

4. Discuss Robert Frost’s applications of “the sound of sense.”

5. In both “Stopping by Woods” and “The Road Not Taken,” the speaker hesitates en route. Compare these

hesitations. Do they derive from the same impulse and misgiving or are they distinct?

6. What is the effect of simple language in “Mending Wall”?

7. Compare themes in “The Wood-Pile” to themes in “The Tuft of Flowers.”

8. Discuss the importance of form in “Fire and Ice.”

2. In “The Road Not Taken,” which of the two roads appears “less traveled” to the speaker?

(A) The one he takes

(B) The one he does not take

(C) Neither of the two