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    The Road Not Taken

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    Maroua Touil
    The poem "The Road Not Taken" describes a traveler standing at a fork in the road, facing a choice between two equally worn paths. Though both paths look the same, the traveler chooses one, saying he will take the other another day. However, he knows it's unlikely he'll have the opportunity to do so. In the future, he admits he will claim to have taken the less-traveled road instead.

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    The Road Not Taken

    Uploaded by

    Maroua Touil
    71 views2 pages
    The poem "The Road Not Taken" describes a traveler standing at a fork in the road, facing a choice between two equally worn paths. Though both paths look the same, the traveler chooses one, saying he will take the other another day. However, he knows it's unlikely he'll have the opportunity to do so. In the future, he admits he will claim to have taken the less-traveled road instead.

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    The road not taken

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    The poem "The Road Not Taken" describes a traveler standing at a fork in the road, facing a choice between two equally worn paths. Though both paths look the same, the traveler chooses one, saying he will take the other another day. However, he knows it's unlikely he'll have the opportunity to do so. In the future, he admits he will claim to have taken the less-traveled road instead.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    71 views2 pages

    The Road Not Taken

    Uploaded by

    Maroua Touil
    The poem "The Road Not Taken" describes a traveler standing at a fork in the road, facing a choice between two equally worn paths. Though both paths look the same, the traveler chooses one, saying he will take the other another day. However, he knows it's unlikely he'll have the opportunity to do so. In the future, he admits he will claim to have taken the less-traveled road instead.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    The road not taken

    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-travelled road.

    Title: ironic, it anticipates regret and remorse. It is the main idea in the poem.

    Form:

    - 4 stanzas of five lines

    - Dominance of the past tense


    - Repetition of some words
    - Rhythm: trochaic tetrameter
    - End Rhyme: The rhyme scheme is abaab, cdccd, efeef, ghggh. It is a regular rhyming
    scheme, different in every stanza. The rhymes are strict and masculine, with the
    notable exception of the last line (we do not usually stress the -ence of difference).

    Useful definitions:

    - Rhyme scheme: is the abstract pattern of end-rhymes in a stanza usually notated with
    lower case letters: the first line and all subsequent lines that rhyme with it are ‘a’, the
    first line not to rhyme with ‘a’ and all subsequent lines that rhyme with it are ‘b’, and
    so on.
    - Masculine Rhyme: a single monosyllabic rhyme like thorn/scorn at the end of a line. It
    is the commonest rhyme in English verse.
    - Feminine rhyme: when words of two or more syllables rhyme it is known as feminine
    or double rhyme
    - Eg: Here lie I and my four daughters
    - Killed by drinking Cheltenham waters.
    - Had we but stuck to Epsom salts,
    - We wouldn’t have been here in these vaults.
    -

    Theme: life choices

    Frost’s concern in this poem is not as much to propose a solution to the dilemma or to advice
    the readers to take the best road simply because that’s not possible given the fact that the two
    roads as the poet describes them seem identical. What he seems more interested in is the
    outcome of that initial life choice.

    Imagery: paths: unpredictable future, ignorance of where each path will lead
    Setting: “yellow wood” autumn season= midlife

    Diction: - words are concrete

    - Denotation: two paths: roads


    - Connotation: two paths: hard decisions
    - The Two Roads:
    When he describes the two roads the speaker says that “the passing there / Had
    worn them really about the same.” In fact, both roads “that morning lay / In leaves no
    step had trodden black,” which means that neither of the roads is less travelled by. A
    statement that stands in direct contradiction with the poet’s claim in the last stanza that
    he has chosen the road less travelled by.

    Relationship between form and content:

    The poem at hand displays a perfect marriage of form and content. The regular rhyming
    scheme insures the unity of every stanza and creates a sense of movement and evolution in the
    poem. Many of its sentences are highly aphoristic but wrought from simple diction. It is base
    on the central well known metaphor of the fork in roads as a metaphor for the difficulty of
    choice in human life. All this makes the poem appealing and easily memorised.

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