Poetry Assignment – the Road Not Taken
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The speaker of the poem “The Road Not Taken” could be a man who stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. But there are at least three possibilities as to who the speaker is in the poem. The fact that the speaker always says “I,” many people believe that the speaker in the poem is Robert Frost himself. However, the poet himself often said that the poem was about a friend of his named Edward Thomas who thought a lot about how our decisions cannot be taken back and about how much those decisions impact our lives. Finally, you can simply say that the speaker is no one in particular, just a random human being. Even though the ideas of the poem are universal, they dont depend on who the speaker is. In this poem, there are two paths to choose from a fork in the road and both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with untrodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day. Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will recreate the scene with a slight twist. He will claim that he took the less-traveled road.
The circumstances that gave rise to the poem “The Road Not Taken” are the deliberations made by Robert Frost of how a traveler comes to a fork in the road and needs to decide which way to go to continue his journey. After much mental debate, the traveler picks the road “less traveled by.” The figurative meaning is not too hidden either. The poem describes the tough choices people stand for when traveling the road of life. The words “sorry” and “sigh” make the tone of the poem somewhat gloomy. The traveler regrets and leaves the possibilities of the road not chosen behind. He realizes he probably wont pass this way again. Frost sets the poem on a forest road on an autumn morning. He received inspiration for the poem from the landscape in rural Gloucestershire, England. While living in Great Britain from 1912 to 1915, Frost and his family had rented a cottage, in Little Iddens, near Dymock, Gloucestershire, in the summer of 1914. Frost claims that he wrote this poem about his friend Edward Thomas, with whom he had walked many times in the woods near London. Frost has said that while walking they would come to different paths and after choosing one, Thomas would always fret wondering what they might have missed by not taking the other path.
The situation that is presented here is that on the surface, it seems to be encouraging the reader to follow the road “less travelled by” in life, a not-very-subtle metaphor for living life as a loner and choosing independence for its own sake when all other considerations come up equal. There is some evidence that makes this interpretation reasonable. The central situation is that one has to choose one road or the other without compromise, an absolutist situation