The Road Not Taken

In many ways, “The Road Not Taken” is a young adult’s poem. The poem’s slender narrative explores a moment of choice, do this or do that, the moment the path a person travels suddenly offers a choice and requires a decision. If the metaphor applies to something greater than picking one’s way in the woods, the thematic implications are at once inspirational and unsettling. Given that the critical high-stakes decisions that a person makes to direct their life-narrative are made under the age of 30, often much sooner, the poem speaks most directly to that demographic, twenty-somethings who must continually confront forks in the road of their life. These are not the trivial choices people make daily—what to eat, when to go to sleep, what program to watch—but rather the kind of once-in-a-lifetime decisions. After all, the hiker intones, “I doubted if I should ever come back” (Line 15).

Yet Frost was in his forties at the time of the poem’s composition. That disparity gifts the poem with its brittle irony. The poem confronts the perplexing, very human dilemma that people want their lives to matter, that they need to believe that the choices they make matter and that those same choices are made with insight, perspicuity, and confidence, that a person boldly sorts through possible lives to select, in a meaningful gesture of will, the life and the person they want to be.