The Road not Taken: Would you Do the Same?

There are poems and poems. Most talk about love, some address other human feelings, some even tell us stories of heroic deeds, or holy events or just the simple life. Some are long and drag on forever and some barely have an extension of three lines; but for me, there is no poem like “The Road not Taken” by Robert Frost. It is not the most beautiful poem I have ever read though it is one of the most transcendental. It is not about love or hate. It is a mirror image that shows us accurately who we are and what we are by adopting the figure of a traveler who has already spent most of his life by the time he talks to us and tells us about that moment when he made a decision and took one of two roads in front of him. He went through the one that was not what most people took. And that was it, that decision literally defined his life from then on. Does he have any regrets? None apparently, but then again…what if he had taken the other one? Remember the title:  The Road not Taken.

We all go through that, we all come to a moment like that of the traveler’s and some of us live to regret that decision and some live remembering that decision as the best one we ever made. We all coincide in recalling that as a landmark in our lives, and also just like the traveler, we have this nagging feeling, denied perhaps but never completely forgotten, that torments us by questioning with a soft voice that yet resounds more than any thunder. It says: “What if I had made a different decision?”

The Road not Taken

By Robert Frost 

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;        5

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,        10

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.        15

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.        20