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

When one gets a little older, it is quite easy to forget about various things learned while in school. So much information is taught on a daily basis, only really important facts stay with someone for his or her entire live. All of us had to take English throughout school and because of that we read many books and poems. No poem ever had a lasting affect on me except for the one above by Robert Frost. “The Road Not Taken” is an amazing poem that focuses on a theme that is constant and extremely important in our lives: “choices.” Some choices can be small or inconsequential and others can be life changing.

The major point I want to get across for the youth today is that once a choice is made, there is no looking back. Regret is a sickness that can control one’s entire mental state as it always has negative consequences. If a bad decision has been made, instead of dwelling on it, contemplate new decisions that will provide a better outcome. At the end of Frost’s poem, he says, “that has made all the difference.” The phrase is neither positive nor negative. It is simply neutral. Literary critics and theorists for decades have said that the central theme of his poem is making choices yet, to me, it is quite obvious that the poem is not so much about choices. It is about living with those choices for good or bad.

When one is young, there are far more opportunities and choices that arise; young people have their entire lives ahead of them. One of the major things that separates us from other species is our ability to choose. So, choose wisely and don’t dwell on mistakes. Dwell on how to fix them with more sensible choices.

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