Robert Frost’s Poem - ‘The Road not Taken’

1. Critical Analysis of Robert Frost’s
Poem - ‘The Road not Taken’
Prepared by
Anjali Rathod

2. Name : Anjali Rathod
Sem : 2
Roll No : 2
Enrollment No : 4069206420220024
Subject : Critical Analysis of Robert Frost’s Poem - ‘The Road
Not Taken’
Subject code : 22401
Contact Info : rathodanjali20022002ui@gmail.com
Submitted to : S. B. Gardi Department of English , MK
Bhavnagar University

3. ➢ Robert Frost
➢ The Road not Taken
➢ Analysis of the poem
➢ Conclusion
➢ References
Points to Ponder

4. ➢ Robert Frost (1874-1963), in full name Robert Lee Frost was an American poet
who was much admired for his depictions of the rural life of New England and his
command of American colloquial speech, and his realistic verse portraying
ordinary people in everyday situations. (Gerber)
➢ Frost is a profound ironist, a creator of metaphor who paradoxically teaches that
the real world may be preferable to imaginative creation because the fictional
world may lead to delusion, even madness. (Greiner)
➢ Mr. Frost’s personal attitude , if we may believe his poetry, is much the same. He
would probably to himself; ‘I am a specimen farmer, teacher, traveller, citizen,
poet; and I haven’t enough of anything to sell; but i’ve got a few mountains and
valleys inside of me, and a bit of sea to look address , i’m headed for something
somewhere, and i’m bound to keep going.” (Monroe)
Robert Frost

5. ➢ The poem was published in The Atlantic Monthly in August 1915 and used in his
collection Mountain Interval(1916) . It is written in Iambic Tetrameter, it employs an
ABAAB rhyme scheme in each of its four stanzas. (Britannica)
➢ Frost’s inspiration for the poem is generally accepted to be his friend and fellow
poet, Edward Thomas. During the time Frost lived in England, the two would often
go for walks led by Thomas. (Kjeldsen)
➢ Frost’s comment about the poem, the importance he always placed on a metaphor,
and his careful word choices throughout the poem direct us to do so. What’s more,
as a result of those efforts, the apparent contradiction we initially see disappears.
His supposition is that the poet is reflecting on a human tendency to seek and see
patterns by which we give meaning and order to our lives. (Kjeldsen)
➢ The poem was mistakenly construed to affirm the importance of non-conformist
individualism by taking the lesser-traveled road, it is new expected to be heard as a
poem exposing man’s self-deception and tendency to rationalization. (Kjeldsen)
The Road not Taken

6. ➢ ‘The Road not Taken’ is simply a poem about individualism , about having
taken a road fewer have traveled. (Kjeldsen)
➢ The poem has remained an enigma. If it is not a poem about roads that are
markedly different ,then it should not follow that taking one road would be of
greater impact than taking the other. Yet that claim is made, and we are left
with the question of Frost’s intention in presenting us with what appears to be
a rather obvious contradiction. (Kjeldsen)
➢ The same idea when he argues that “the poem isn’t a salute to can do
individualism,” but rather one that parodies “the self-deception we practice
when constructing the story of our own lives”. (Kjeldsen)
➢ Frost’s attitude toward Thomas’s tendency to belabor and regret his choices
may have been inspired by the poem, but the poem is not limited to or by this
circumstance. (Kjeldsen)
Analysis of the poem

7. ➢ The road that is not taken is the one the speaker has looked down with such
care. There is no indication that he looks “down” the other road as well. The
situation in the first stanza shows the speaker contemplating one road. (Kjeldsen)
➢ Frost’s poem has less to do with the nature of the actual road we choose, but
more with the nature of our relationship to time while considering the very
roads we were travelling what we do with each moment while on the
road.(Kjeldsen)
➢ In ‘The Road not Taken’ the choice the speaker makes between stanza one and
stanza two is to focus on the here and now.(Kjeldsen)
➢ The meaning of “I took the one less traveled” would have been sufficient , and
even more forceful since the spoken stress would have fallen more naturally on
the “less” than it does now on the “by”.(Kjeldsen)
Continue…

8. Two roads diverged in a wood , and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
➢ The Repetitions of the “I”, “makes the whole thing more expressive and
heartfelt”, and “high tone of poignant annunciation that really makes all the
difference”.(Kjeldsen)
➢ The stops the speaker’s forward looking flow and forces him to come back to
himself in that moment, to be present.(Kjeldsen)
➢ The choice that has “made all the difference” is the choice to not hurry through
life towards the future, passing by the present without notice, but rather to live
in the present moment. (Kjeldsen)
Continue…

9. I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence.
➢ The “sigh” that begins the final stanza happens in an undefined “somewhere”
but at a doubly emphasized time. (Kjeldsen)
➢ Frost chooses to use the phrase “ages and ages”, bringing to mind an extremely
long period of time. Born in 1874, Frost was over forty years old when ‘The Road
not Taken’ first appeared in print, and although he lived to be eighty-eight, the
average lifespan of a man in his early twenties at the turn of the century was
sixty-one. (Kjeldsen)
➢ To add to the sense created in the poem of more than simply years or decades
passing, Frost ends the line with the word “hence”( “archaic language definition
of “hence” is from this world or from the living”. (Kjeldsen)
Continue…

10. ➢ ‘The Road not Taken’ had he meant it as a
contradiction , a parody about a friend , or a
poem on self-deception.
➢ The poem leads us to what Frost wanted us to
understand if we choose to take our time with
both our lives and his poetry.
To sum up

11. ➢ Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "The Road Not Taken". Encyclopedia Britannica, 25
Feb. 2023, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Road-Not-Taken. Accessed 13 March 2023.
➢ Gerber, Philip L.. "Robert Frost". Encyclopedia Britannica, 25 Jan. 2023,
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Frost. Accessed 12 March 2023.
➢ Greiner, Donald J. “Robert Frost.” Contemporary Literature, vol. 18, no. 1, 1977, pp. 93–97.
JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/1207853. Accessed 12 Mar. 2023.
➢ Kjeldsen, Neil. “Taking ‘the Other.’” The Robert Frost Review, no. 28, 2018, pp. 123–33.
JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26731492. Accessed 12 Mar. 2023.
➢ Monroe, Harriet. “Robert Frost.” Poetry, vol. 25, no. 3, 1924, pp. 146–53. JSTOR,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/20574872. Accessed 12 Mar. 2023.
References