To delve further into the mystery, we must look into the interesting origin of the poem.Īccording to Frost, the poem was about his very close friend Edward Thomas, a fellow writer and (eventual) poet in his last years who Frost got to know very well during his time in England in the early 20th century. He also later stated this was despite the fact that he had been “doing my best to make it obvious by my manner that I was fooling … Mea culpa.” He experienced this fact when he first began sharing it, with everyone taking the poem “pretty seriously”, as he noted after reading it to a group of college students. You see, Frost was well aware that people would misunderstand “The Road Not Taken”. Frost also called the poem his “ private jest“. Perhaps speculatively backing this up is the fact that the poem is called “The Road Not Taken”, rather than “The Road Less Traveled”, priming the reader to focus on the former, rather than the latter.īut is there any actual evidence to support one interpretation over the other, at least as far as Frost was intending when he wrote it (if he had any real intent at all)?įrost would later state of the poem, “You have to be careful of that one it’s a tricky poem – very tricky” (Letters xiv-xv). It is generally thought that the latter, “regret”, notion is the “correct” interpretation, at least as far as the original intent of the author. Of course, it isn’t wholly clear at this point whether in “ages and ages hence” he is sighing and noting “that has made all the difference” out of contentment- that his reasoning was sound and that he made the correct choice- or regret, that he’d not been able to see where the other path went, perhaps to a better place than the one he chose on that fateful day. So, in the end, while he was very clear in the present that the two roads were identical with no real reason to take one over the other, later in life he knew he’d once again fool himself, this time successfully, by instead remembering that one road was “less traveled by” and that this influenced his decision, when in fact he really decided on a whim. In the end, he states the most famous part of this poem, though including two key lines that are generally omitted when people are quoting the last stanza of this piece: With no reason to choose one road over the other, the traveler takes one, then consoles himself that he will simply come back another time and see where the other road goes… before admitting that in this thought he was really just trying to fool himself once again, as he had tried to do previously by attempting to convince himself one path was less traveled than the other: Of course, one can’t just stand around in a wood all day, so a choice must be made. To wit, the protagonist of the poem goes out of his way to make it clear that the two paths are virtually identical- neither is more traveled than the other.įrom this, you might actually think one was less trodden, except for the next line when the traveler explains he was really just casting about trying to find some reason to take one road or the other in the previous lines and that in truth the roads seemed equally traveled:
You see, while it may come as a shock to those of us that had a habit of occasionally nodding off in school, the poem has more than just three lines, and the true meaning of (most of) it is fairly obvious if you just read the entire thing all the way through.
While poems can have many different meanings to different people, and certainly parts of this particular poem are very much open to interpretation, what cannot be denied is that the central character of this poem unequivocally does not actually take the road “less traveled”. To begin with, the part of the poem most everyone is intimately familiar is the last three lines:įrom this, and this alone, it would seem the protagonist of the poem took the road less traveled by and this positively benefited his life over taking the more commonly trodden path… Oh, and it also played a small role in the death of the guy it was written about. Most likely, it was a short piece called The Road Not Taken- a poem famous for being one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted poems ever written, and a testament to how twisted the meaning of something can be by taking a quote out of context. Robert Frost is one of the most critically acclaimed American poets of the 20th century, which is a roundabout way of saying you almost certainly studied one of his poems in school.
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