The road not taken by Robert Frost

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874. He moved to New England at the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high school years in Lawrence, Mass. He was enrolled at Dartmouth College in 1892, and later at Harvard, but never earned a formal degree.

"The Road Not Taken" is a poem by Robert Frost, published in 1916 in the collection Mountain Interval.




  


THE ROAD NOT TAKEN
Robert Frost (1874-1963)

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;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

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.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Summary

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.