In Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” (reprinted in Laurence Perrine and Thomas R. Arp, Sound and Senses, 8th ed. [San Diego: Harcourt, 1992] 23) 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-traveled road. The whole poem is an extended metaphor, where Frost describes a path in the woods that is directly comparable to a major decision in life. In this case, the narrator is “lost” in the poem, both on the trail, and in his life."The Road Not Taken" consists of four stanzas of five lines each having an identical rhyme scheme of ABAAB. The first, third, and fourth lines in every stanza rhyme, along with the second and fifth lines. Thus, allowing the poem to flow at a smoother and steadier pace. There are four stressed syllables per line, forming an iambic tetrameter base. A person's life can be metaphorically related to a physical journey filled with many twists and turns. Frost presents to the reader a man’s decision, at a turning point in his life, symbolized by “two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” In the first line, Frost introduces the elements of his primary metaphor: the diverging roads. The speaker expresses his regret that “[he] could not travel both” (line 2). The choice is not easily made since “long I stood” (line 3) before coming to a decision. In an attempt to make a choice, the traveler examines the path “as far as [he] could” (line 4), but his vision is limited because the path bends and is covered “in the undergrowth” (line 5). Thus, indicating that a...
