The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost - Essay Example

     In Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”, the differences between the paths Frost considers are actually very minimal. Neither path seems more or less traveled and neither offers any greater benefit that the other does not equal in some other way. However, the traveler convinces the reader and himself that one road has been traveled a lot and the other has not seen as many travelers. The traveler doesn’t have enough information to make an informed decision regarding which path he should follow and cannot see to the end of either, but he must choose one path to follow and then live with the fact that he may live to regret his decision.

In the poem, the traveler has to make an uninformed decision regarding the path he should take when he comes to a fork in the road.  He looks at both roads but is still uncertain after he weighs all his options because they both seem to be relatively equal which we can see when he says previous travel “had worn them really about the same” even though neither had seemed to be traveled on yet that day. Eventually, he chooses one path and then wonders what he might have missed by not taking the other one.

  After reading the poem through, I think that the traveler picked the road he did based on the fact that he knows he will never know what he might have experienced if he’d gone the other way.  It will always be a mystery to him that will be a source of endless curiosity as he considers what might have been.  This idea comes through toward the end of the poem when he says “I shall be telling this with a sigh”.  The traveler has to pick a road and stick with the decision while at the same time working to forget about the other, which he “… doubts if I should ever come back”.

The traveler had to make a decision similar to what many of us have to do in life, when we have little information on which to base our decision.  Since he weighted both and they seemed equal, the traveler had to pick one and live with the decision of not picking the other road.  He tries to convince himself that “I took the one less traveled by”, but he is simply trying to justify his decision.  The truth of the poem is that we must make the best decisions we can as we travel along the road of life and there will always be another path that will cause us to wonder.