Sign In

The Road Not Taken Summary & Analysis
by Robert Frost

The Road Not Taken Summary & Analysis
by Robert Frost

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
Question about this poem?
Have a question about this poem?
Have a specific question about this poem?
Have a specific question about this poem?
Have a specific question about this poem?
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
A LitCharts expert can help.
Ask us
Ask us
Ask a question
Ask a question
Ask a question

The Full Text of “The Road Not Taken”

1Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

2And sorry I could not travel both

3And be one traveler, long I stood

4And looked down one as far as I could

5To where it bent in the undergrowth;

6Then took the other, as just as fair,

7And having perhaps the better claim,

8Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

9Though as for that the passing there

10Had worn them really about the same,

11And both that morning equally lay

12In leaves no step had trodden black.

13Oh, I kept the first for another day!

14Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

15I doubted if I should ever come back.

16I shall be telling this with a sigh

17Somewhere ages and ages hence:

18Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

19I took the one less traveled by,

20And that has made all the difference.

  • “The Road Not Taken” Introduction

    • Written in 1915 in England, "The Road Not Taken" is one of Robert Frost's—and the world's—most well-known poems. Although commonly interpreted as a celebration of rugged individualism, the poem actually contains multiple different meanings. The speaker in the poem, faced with a choice between two roads, takes the road "less traveled," a decision which he or she supposes "made all the difference." However, Frost creates enough subtle ambiguity in the poem that it's unclear whether the speaker's judgment should be taken at face value, and therefore, whether the poem is about the speaker making a simple but impactful choice, or about how the speaker interprets a choice whose impact is unclear.

  • “The Road Not Taken” Summary

    • The speaker, walking through a forest whose leaves have turned yellow in autumn, comes to a fork in the road. The speaker, regretting that he or she is unable to travel by both roads (since he or she is, after all, just one person), stands at the fork in the road for a long time and tries to see where one of the paths leads. However, the speaker can't see very far because the forest is dense and the road is not straight.

      The speaker takes the other path, judging it to be just as good a choice as the first, and supposing that it may even be the better option of the two, since it is grassy and looks less worn than the other path. Though, now that the speaker has actually walked on the second road, he or she thinks that in reality the two roads must have been more or less equally worn-in.

      Reinforcing this statement, the speaker recalls that both roads were covered in leaves, which had not yet been turned black by foot traffic. The speaker exclaims that he or she is in fact just saving the first road, and will travel it at a later date, but then immediately contradicts him or herself with the acknowledgement that, in life, one road tends to lead onward to another, so it's therefore unlikely that he or she will ever actually get a chance to return to that first road.

      The speaker imagines him or herself in the distant future, recounting, with a sigh, the story of making the choice of which road to take. Speaking as though looking back on his or her life from the future, the speaker states that he or she was faced with a choice between two roads and chose to take the road that was less traveled, and the consequences of that decision have made all the difference in his or her life.

  • “The Road Not Taken” Themes

    • Theme Choices and Uncertainty

      Choices and Uncertainty

      In "The Road Not Taken," the speaker describes him or herself as facing a choice between which of two roads to take. The speaker's choice functions as an extended metaphor for all the choices that the speaker—and all people—must make in life. Through the speaker's experience, the poem explores the nature of choices, and what it means to be a person forced to choose (as all people inevitably are).

      The poem begins with the speaker recounting the experience of facing the choice of which road to take. The speaker's first emotion is "sorrow," as he or she regrets the reality that makes it impossible to "travel both" roads, or to experience both things. The poem makes clear that every choice involves the loss of opportunity and that choices are painful because they must be made with incomplete information. The speaker tries to gather as much information as possible by looking "down one [road] as far as I could," but there is a limit to what the speaker can see, as the road is "bent," meaning that it curves, leaving the rest of it out of sight. So the speaker, like anyone faced with a choice, must make a choice, but can't know enough to be sure which choice is the right one. The speaker, as a result, is paralyzed: "long I stood" contemplating which road to choose.

      The speaker does eventually choose a road based on which one appears to have been less traveled, but the poem shows that making that choice doesn't actually solve the speaker's problem. Immediately after choosing a road, the speaker admits that the two roads were "worn ... really about the same" and that both roads "equally lay" without any leaves "trodden black" by passersby. So the speaker has tried to choose the road that seemed less traveled, but couldn't tell which road was actually less traveled. By making a choice, the speaker will now never get the chance to experience the other road and can never know which was less traveled. The speaker hides from this psychic pain by announcing that he or she is just saving "the first [road] for another day!" But, again, reality sets in: "I doubted if I should ever come back." Every choice may be a beginning, but it is also an ending, and having to choose cuts off knowledge of the alternate choice, such that the person choosing will never know if they made the "right" choice.

      The poem ends with the speaker imagining the far future, when he or she thinks back to this choice and believes that it made "all the difference." But the rest of the poem has shown that the speaker doesn't (and can never) know what it would have been like to travel down that other road—and can't even know if the road taken was indeed the one less traveled. And, further, the final line is a subtle reminder that the only thing one can know about the choices one makes in life is that they make “all the difference”—but how, or from what, neither the poem nor life provide any answer.

    • Theme Individualism and Nonconformity

      Individualism and Nonconformity

      In "The Road Not Taken," the speaker is faced with a choice between two roads and elects to travel by the one that appears to be slightly less worn. The diverging roads may be read as being an extended metaphor for two kinds of life choices in general: the conventional versus the unconventional. By choosing the less-traveled path over the well-traveled path, the speaker suggests that he or she values individualism over conformity.

      The speaker, when deciding which road to take, notes that the second is “just as fair” as the first, but that it has “perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear.” In other words, the second road had the added benefit of being less well-worn than the first. Notably, this absence of signs of travel is phrased positively rather than negatively. Rather than stating outright that the road looked as if it had not had many travelers, the speaker states that it was “grassy” (a consequence of low foot traffic) and that it “wanted wear” (as if it were almost asking for the speaker to walk on it). The speaker presents nonconformity as a positive trait, and even implies that popularity can make things less appealing: the first road, because of its popularity, lacks the grass that makes the second path so enticing.

      Despite the speaker’s preference for nonconformity, though, the poem ultimately remains ambiguous about whether choosing the road “less traveled” necessarily leads to a better or more interesting life. First, the poem questions whether it's actually even possible to identify what is non-conformist. After choosing the road that seems to have been less traveled, the speaker then comments that, in fact, the two roads had been "worn ... really about the same." The speaker seems to sense that though he or she has attempted to take the road "less traveled," there's no actual way to know if it was less traveled.

      Second, the poem subtly questions its own final line, in which the speaker asserts that choosing the road he or she did actually take has made "all the difference.” Many readers interpret this final line as being an affirmation of the speaker’s decision to venture off the beaten path. But note that the poem is careful not to state that choosing the road less traveled has necessarily made a positive difference. Further, because the poem has raised the possibility that the path the speaker took was not in fact "less traveled," it also raises the possibility that the speaker is wrong, and taking that particular path can't be said to have made any specific difference at all. There is also a third option offered by the poem, which is that the speaker is correct that choosing that road "made all the difference," but that this "difference" was created not by taking the objectively less traveled path—because no one can measure precisely which path was less traveled—but rather by making the choice to try to take the less traveled path. In this reading, the poem implies that it is the effort made to take the less conventional path that makes the difference.

    • Theme Making Meaning

      Making Meaning

      In “The Road Not Taken,” the speaker must choose between two roads without having complete information about how they differ. Even after having chosen the second road, the speaker is unable to evaluate his or her experience, because the speaker can't know how things would have been different if he or she had chosen the first road. In the final stanza, the speaker imagines him or herself in the distant future looking back on this choice. In this way, the poem engages not just with a choice being made, but with the way that the speaker interprets that choice and assigns it meaning after the fact. It is only when looking back, after all, that the speaker sees the choice of which road to take as having made "all the difference."

      Many people read the poem straightforwardly, and believe the choice did make "all the difference." The poem, however, is not clear about whether the speaker's final assertion is true. The speaker explains that he or she chose to take the second road because it seemed more “grassy” and less worn than the first, but soon admits that the two roads were actually worn to "about the same" degree. By raising the question of whether there was actually anything special about the road the speaker chose to take, the poem further questions whether taking the second road could have possibly "made all the difference," or even any difference at all. The poem implies that the speaker in the future may look back and construct a narrative of his or her life that is simpler and cleaner, and which gives this choice more meaning than the truth would support. Using this interpretation, the poem can be read as commenting more broadly on how all people fictionalize their lives by interpreting their choices, in hindsight, as being more purposeful and meaningful than they really are.

      The poem can also be read in a third and more positive way, though. In this third interpretation, the poem implies that it’s less important whether the speaker’s choice actually "made all the difference" than it is that he or she believes that it did. In this reading, the poem recognizes that the speaker—and all people—fictionalize their lives by creating meaning where there may not be any, but portrays such meaning-making not as fraudulent, but rather as a part of being human.

      All three of these different possible readings co-exist in "The Road Not Taken." The poem does not suggest a solution to the question of the meaning in the speaker's choice, but rather comes to embody the question itself, allowing for contemplation of the mysteries inherent in defining or interpreting a life.

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Road Not Taken”

    • Lines 1-3

      Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
      And sorry I could not travel both
      And be one traveler,

      The famous opening lines of "The Road Not Taken" introduce readers to the choice the speaker faces, which will become the main focus of the poem: two roads diverge, and the speaker, unable to travel both, must choose between them. It's important to notice that, right from the start in line 2, the speaker reveals a sense of sorrow at having to choose between the two roads: he or she is "sorry" that choosing one road means missing out on the other. The speaker's struggle sets up one of the poem's main themes—the role of choice and uncertainty in life. It also reveals something important about the speaker's attitude towards the role of choice in life: his or her sense of regret that one is often forced to choose, and that choosing one thing means not choosing another.

      The speaker's regret lingers through the rest of the poem, so that, even after he or she has made a decision, it is difficult not to wonder about what would have been had he or she chosen the other road. One of the core ironies of the poem is that it doesn't actually matter which road the speaker chooses, since both roads would leave him or her with a feeling of regret about what he or she might have missed out on. The poem's title also speaks to this dilemma directly, not only signaling that the focus of the poem is the road not taken, but even implying that there will always be a road not taken, and with it an unshakable feeling of regret over what one might have missed. Frost himself even indicated at one point that he may have modeled the speaker in this poem after an acquaintance of his named Edward Thomas, whom he described as "a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other."

      In light of the choice presented in the poem's first lines, the most obvious guiding question for the poem may at first seem to be, "Which road will the speaker choose?" But if one keeps in mind that the speaker will be stuck with a feeling of regret no matter which road he or she chooses, the guiding question then becomes, "How will the speaker deal with his or her feeling of regret at having been forced, by the demands of life, to choose one road rather than the other?"

    • Lines 3-5

      long I stood
      And looked down one as far as I could
      To where it bent in the undergrowth;

      LitCharts Logo

      Unlock all 468 words of this analysis of Lines 3-5 of “The Road Not Taken,” and get the Line-by-Line Analysis for every poem we cover.

      Plus so much more...

    • Lines 6-8

      Then took the other, as just as fair,
      And having perhaps the better claim,
      Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

    • Lines 9-12

      Though as for that the passing there
      Had worn them really about the same,
      And both that morning equally lay
      In leaves no step had trodden black.

    • Lines 13-15

      Oh, I kept the first for another day!
      Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
      I doubted if I should ever come back.

    • Lines 16-17

      I shall be telling this with a sigh
      Somewhere ages and ages hence:

    • Lines 18-20

      Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
      I took the one less traveled by,
      And that has made all the difference.

  • “The Road Not Taken” Symbols

    • Symbol Diverging Roads

      Diverging Roads

      The entirety of "The Road Not Taken" is an extended metaphor in which the two roads that diverge symbolize life's many choices. In much the same way that people are generally unable to see what the future holds, the speaker is unable to see what lies ahead on each path. Furthermore, what little the speaker thinks he or she understands about each path at the moment of decision later turns out to have been less clear cut, underscoring the impossibility of predicting where one's life choices will lead. Just as there are no "do-overs" in life, the speaker acknowledges (in lines 2-3 and 14-15) that he or she can only travel one road, and will not be granted the chance to "come back" and try another route. In these ways, the diverging roads in the poem symbolize all of life's choices—the confusion of having to make choices in the moment, the painful impossibility of foreseeing their consequences, and the sense, when looking back, that those choices defined your life, even when you can't know in what way, or even whether they did at all.

    • Symbol The Road Less Traveled

      The Road Less Traveled

      The entirety of "The Road Not Taken" is an extended metaphor in which the road "less traveled" symbolizes the path of nonconformity. The speaker, when trying to choose which road to take, looks for the road that seems less worn. At the end of the poem, the speaker asserts that choosing the road less traveled "has made all the difference"—the suggestion being that he or she has led a life of nonconformity, and is happier because of it. However, the status of the road less traveled as a symbol of nonconformity is complicated somewhat by the fact that the poem makes it clear that the speaker has no way of actually knowing whether the road he or she chose was really the road less traveled: both roads, after all, are "worn...really about the same." This, in turn, raises questions about the speaker's notions of individualism and nonconformity, suggesting that these ideals may not be as easily definable as the speaker of the poem thinks. In this way, the road less traveled is as much a symbol of nonconformity as it is a symbol of the difficulty of defining that ideal.

  • “The Road Not Taken” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Extended Metaphor

      "The Road Not Taken" is an example of an extended metaphor in which the tenor (or the thing being spoken about) is never stated explicitly—but it's clear that the poet is using the road less traveled as a metaphor for leading an unconventional way of life. The entire poem, then, is an extended metaphor in which the fork in the road represents all of the many choices one faces in life.

      As with all extended metaphors, this one contains many smaller metaphors inside it. The bend in the road that the speaker describes in line 5 may be read as a metaphor for people's inability to comprehend the consequences of their decisions before they make them. The speaker's realization that, despite his or her initial impressions, the two roads are in fact equally untraveled (lines 9-12) may be interpreted within the context of the extended metaphor to mean that everyone's life is unique, no matter what path one chooses.

      Frost uses this extended metaphor to argue that life is full of moments in which one is forced to decide between two or more alternatives without complete information about what each choice entails, while the speaker's attempts to rationalize his or her decision in the moment, and to assign it meaning after the fact (as described in the last stanza), mirror the ways in which all people attempt to rationalize and make meaning out of the choices they make in life.

    • Irony

      LitCharts Logo

      Unlock all 506 words of this analysis of Irony in “The Road Not Taken,” and get the poetic device analyses for every poem we cover.

      Plus so much more...

    • Epizeuxis

    • Repetition

    • Enjambment

    • Assonance

  • “The Road Not Taken” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Diverge
    • Yellow wood
    • Undergrowth
    • Fair
    • Wanted
    • Passing
    • Trodden
    • Hence
    Diverge

    • To diverge is to split off in a different direction. In other words, the speaker is describing a fork in the road.

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Road Not Taken”

    • Form

      "The Road Not Taken" is an example of formal verse (meaning that it rhymes and has a strict meter), but it doesn't adhere to any specific poetic form (such as a sonnet) that dictates, for instance, how many lines a poem must have.

      "The Road Not Taken" is a 20-line poem made up of four quintains (five-line stanzas). The four stanzas loosely correspond to the four stages of the speaker's engagement with the decision which the poem takes as its subject: weighing the different options; choosing to take the road less traveled; realizing the decision-making process was flawed; and finally, attempting to make sense of the experience despite this.

    • Meter

      "The Road Not Taken" is written in loose iambic tetrameter, meaning that each line mostly consists of iambs (unstressed-stressed) and has roughly eight syllables. However, Frost frequently substitutes anapests (unstressed-unstressed-stressed) for iambs throughout the poem. For instance, in the poem's first stanza, each line contains three iambs and one anapest:

      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;

      Note that in the above, the order of iambs and anapests differs from line to line. For instance, the first line goes iamb-iamb-anapest-iamb, while the second goes iamb-anapest-iamb-iamb.

      Frost's approach to meter is artful but not strict, lending the poem a pleasing rhythm while still allowing for him to employ an informal, reflective tone that doesn't feel artificial because of an unnaturally consistent pattern of stresses.

      Frost's use of iambs also lends the poem a steady rhythm of walking (step-step step-step), helping to capture the experience of the speaker's walk through the woods in the sound of the words.

      "The Road Not Taken" is typical of Frost's work in that he tended to use traditional meters in his poems, but adhered to those meters loosely rather than strictly.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "The Road Not Taken" follows a strict ABAAB rhyme scheme.

      In addition to the poem's regular use of end rhyme, it also makes irregular use of assonance. The vowel sound /ah/ (as in the word "and") repeats throughout lines 6-12, adding to the pleasing musicality of the verse.

      While it was not out of the ordinary for Frost to use strict rhyme schemes of the sort present in "The Road Not Taken," it also wasn't universal—sometimes his use of rhyme could be erratic.

  • “The Road Not Taken” Speaker

    • The speaker of "The Road Not Taken" is anonymous and has no specified gender. While it's possible to argue that Frost himself is the speaker, there isn't definitive evidence that that is the case—and in fact, there is evidence to suggest that Frost may have based the speaker in this poem on his acquaintance Edward Thomas, whom Frost described as "a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other." Further, there is an ironic distance between what the speaker is saying in the poem and what the poem itself seems to be saying, further implying that Frost is not the same as the speaker.

      The speaker, faced with a seemingly insignificant decision between two roads, makes a choice to follow the one that appears less worn—seemingly an argument against conformity—and then spends the rest of the poem reflecting on the decision. The poem ends with the speaker imagining him or herself in the distant future, reflecting back on the decision and believing that taking the road "less traveled [...] has made all the difference." The poem's ending reveals the speaker to be deeply concerned with the ways in which even small decisions may have far-reaching implications. However, by acknowledging in lines 9-12 that his or her decision was based on incomplete information, the speaker also acknowledges that the consequences of these decisions can rarely be predicted or controlled, and that it's often difficult to understand the meaning of one's choices in a broader context, even a long time after those decisions have been made.

  • “The Road Not Taken” Setting

    • The poem takes place in a forest in autumn, after the leaves have begun to change color. More specifically, the poem takes place at a spot in the woods at which a road forks into two. The two roads continue on from the fork, but the roads soon pass out of sight as they wind and bend in the undergrowth of the forest. A person standing at the fork can see that one of the roads is a bit grassier than the other, but they are equally strewn with freshly fallen leaves, and in truth both roads appear to be about equally worn.

      However, while it's accurate to say that the poem is set in a forest, it is equally accurate to say that the poem is set in the speaker's mind. Throughout the first three stanzas, the speaker is remembering the forest, the fork in the road, and making the decision to choose one rather than the other. And in the fourth and final stanza, the speaker imagines him or herself even further into the distant future, and looking back from that vantage in time to the moment of choosing the road in the wood.

      This dual setting fits with the way that the poem seems to describe the speaker's straightforward decision about taking the less worn road in a wood, and also the way that the poem functions as an extended metaphor in which the speaker attempts to come to terms with a choice he or she made in the past.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “The Road Not Taken”

      Literary Context

      Although Frost was an American poet, many of his earliest poems were written and published in England between 1912 and 1915. Frost didn't associate himself with any particular poetic school or movement, but when he began to publish work more widely in the United States in 1915—still very early in his career—the imagist poets were instrumental in helping to promote his work. Ezra Pound, for instance, favorably reviewed one of Frost's early collections (A Boy's Will), saying that Frost's style "has just this utter sincerity." Frost's poetry might also be broadly considered to be modernist.

      "The Road Not Taken" appeared in 1916 as the first poem in a collection titled Mountain Interval. Mountain Interval, and "The Road Not Taken" along with it, were regarded as a turning point in Frost's career, marking a shift from his earlier poems (that were largely dramatic monologues or dialogues) to poems that were, as the Poetry Foundation describes them, "brief meditation[s] sparked by an object, person or event."

      As in many of Frost's later poems, "The Road Not Taken" takes place in a pastoral setting in which the characters' actions take on symbolic significance to illustrate some general truth about human life. In a time when many of his contemporaries were turning away from the traditional verse practices of the 19th century, Frost was markedly more conservative in his technique, always using traditional meters. He was influenced by 19th-century Romantic poets (such as Keats) in both his subject matter and his thinking about craft, but he made his poems feel distinctly modern through his use of colloquial and everyday speech.

      Historical Context

      Frost wrote "The Road Not Taken" at the start of World War I, just before returning to the United States from England. As a poem about the impossibility of understanding the significance of one's life choices, "The Road Not Taken" can be read in the context of Frost's personal life, as he moved his family overseas, just as easily as it can be read in the context of world history, with a global war suddenly and unexpectedly erupting and upending people's lives. Take, for example, the case of Frost's friend, Edward Thomas, after whom Frost reportedly modeled the speaker of "The Road Not Taken." Thomas, after reading an advance copy of Frost's poem, decided to enlist in the army and died two years thereafter.

  • More “The Road Not Taken” Resources

The LitCharts.com logo.
Saving guides requires a free LitCharts account
Easily access your saved guides anytime.
Continue with GoogleContinue with Google

or

Already have an account? Sign in
Complete your free account to save guides
Select one
Please enter as MM/DD/YYYY
Already have an account? Sign in
Home About Contact Help
Copyright © 2025 All Rights Reserved
Terms Privacy Privacy Request