Analyse af Robert Frosts 'The Road Not Taken'

Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken, 1915 Choices are an important part of people’s life. There always comes a time when a choice has to be taken. The choices people make define them as a person, and makes them who they are. Choices may or may not be life changing, but the importance is really not this. The importance is that you make the choice or decision that makes you happy in your life. In the poem ‘The road not taken’ published in 1915, written by Robert Frost, the narrator has to make a decision of which path to go through. The path is not only a path he or she has to walk through to get to his/hers destination. It is a symbol or metaphor of a bigger decision in the narrator’s life, a life changing choice. The narrator often wonder about what could have happened, and how his/hers life would be if he/she had chosen another path. In the poem there are four stanzas that each contains five sentences. The language is simple but formal. The poem is written in 1915, so the language is different from what we use today, and it makes it sound more formal. In every stanza the last word of the sentence rhymes with the last word of the third sentence and of the fourth sentence. The last word of the second sentence and the last word of the last sentence rhymes with each other. This rhyme scheme is called ABAAB, and it is the same in every stanza.“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth.”The narrator is not described very well in the poem. Age, gender or name is not known. Instead you get to know the narrator by his or her thoughts. The narrator is very insecure about the choice he or she has to make. The narrator ends up choosing the 2nd road, but no one has walked on that path before him/her which makes the decision even harder to make. The narrator is unable to follow the lead of other people, and he/she is afraid that the choice or the path that was taken was the wrong one. As mentioned earlier, when the narrator looks back on the decision, he/she wonders what could have been. The people, who read this poem, can easily empathize and identify him or herself in the narrator. Everyone either already have or they will in the future, make a choice in their life without the knowledge of what the consequence of the choice is. The time of the year in the poem is autumn. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”- The leaves turn yellow when it is autumn. “In leaves no step had trodden black.” – In the autumn there are a lot of leaves, and as it said here there are leaves on each path. The theme of the poem is decisions in life and the importance of walking your own path. Even though walking a path that already has been taken seems easier, it’s important to choose the path that’s right for you. In the poem, the narrator has a problem with choosing which path to walk. In the first stanza, the narrator says: “And sorry I could not travel both, and be one traveler, long I stood”. This indicates that the narrator is standing at a cross road. He is contemplating his opportunities, but he knows that he has to choose one of them. The narrator chooses the path that is ‘less traveled by’. Even though the narrator seems to be happy about the choice, he/she still wonders what might have been or what could have happened. That is the thing about choices; you can’t go back and ‘unmake’ them. Instead you have to accept the consequence that follows with the choice you make.