According to the poet, sometimes the journey itself is the destination. The ends was the means, in such a stance. The path was taken just for the sake of it. What Robert Frost implies here is that the practice of teaching had been made crude by teachers themselves they did not attend to the profession out of love for the vocation and sincerity in fulfilling their duties. The ones who passed by that route had worn it out further. “The second path is grassy and wanted wear”: The poet implies that it needed to be pruned. This is the first road, therefore people took the second one as it was easier to traverse. The road that is caught in the undergrowth indicates entanglement with obstacles. The poet also experiences a sense of stagnation as he cannot progress forward to make a decision. Autumn is symbolic of incipient decay and stagnation. The yellow color of the woods points to the season of autumn. The poet may be trying to determine what his instinct is telling him in order to arrive at a final decision. A few instances are “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”, “Birches” and “Mowing.” The image of ‘woods’ can also symbolize instinct as opposed to social norms.
The image of ‘woods’ has represented indecision in Frost’s other poems too. The image of woods signifies ‘indecision’ as the poet is lost searching for answers. Though the problem of making a choice at a crossroads is almost a commonplace, the drama of the poem conveys a larger mythology by including evolutionary metaphors and suggesting the passage of eons.” The process of selection implies an unretracing process of change through which individual kinds are permanently altered by experience. Species are made and survive when individuals diverge from others in a branching scheme, as the roads diverge for the speaker. Robert Faggen states “This psychological representation of the developmental principle of divergence strikes to the core of Darwinian theory. One choice is considered default and natural the other unnatural and deviant. By presenting the two choices he may be implying that one is wrong and the other right, or that one is superior to the other. The concept of two choices is a thought-provoking one. “And that has made all the difference.” Other Symbols in “The Road Not Taken” The decision is indeed unique, this is why he states: Sometimes life is beyond logic, categorization and mathematical division. What the poet shows through “The Road Not Taken” is that decisions in life cannot be specifically organized into logical alternatives or mathematical units. Therefore, he eventually took the middle path. He categorically states that he kept the first for another day. It implies that he did not take the second, as that was the one commonly used. But he also mentions that the path was worn out due to constant use and toward the end of the poem he mentions that he took the ‘road less travelled’. It is generally conceived that he took the second road. He first ruminates over traveling on the first road, and then talks of the second road. He lives a practical life, yet his imagination manifests itself in his writing.Īt the outset he comprehends that he is sorry could not travel both : “And sorry I could not travel both/ And be one traveler.” His first impression is that it is not practical. “The Road Not Taken” may also allude to Frost’s shifting between imagination and reality. Had he taken any one of the popular roads, the poem would be entitled “The Road Taken”.
The greatest evidence for this is Frost himself: poet and teacher. Thus, he does not take either of the two roads described, but forges his own path. He finally arrives at the decision that one can be a poet and yet teach one can be a teacher and yet philosophize. In the prescribed poem, he ruminates over which vocation to pursue, that of a poet or a teacher. Rather, he traverses the middle path.įrost was always caught between two worlds: that of being a teacher and a poet between reality and imagination.
However, the title puts more emphasis on the idea that Frost had not taken any of the specified roads. The popular perception of the poem is that Robert Frost takes one of the two roads he describes. The road in question is situated in a forest. The crossroad functions as an evocative metaphor for a vital decision. The metaphor of the road is used persistently in the poem, and is therefore an extended metaphor. However, it signifies not only journey but also the destination. The symbol of a road has been predominantly used to indicate the journey of Life. The Crossroad Symbolic of the Turning Point in Frost’s Life
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