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Poem Explication

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Submitted By yangt10
Words 704
Pages 3
Teresa Yang
ENG 155:
Introduction to Literature
March 26, 2015
An Extended Metaphor:
Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”
In Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken”, it explores the aspects of human decisions and choices, corresponding to an oxymoron because choices that impacts so little should bear the most indifference, but instead it is the most complicated. It is shown through several different techniques such as metaphors, symbolism, repetition, and his writing style.
Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874 in San Francisco but soon moved to
Pennsylvania (Robert). His dad died when he was around the age of eleven years old. Frost lived with sister who was two years younger and his mother. During his college years, he enrolled at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire and later at Harvard University in
Boston. He had multiple occupations such as a teacher, cobbler, and editor. His first poem,
“My Butterfly,” was published on November 8, 1894 in the New York Newspaper. Later in his life, he married Elinor Miriam who inspired many of his pieces. He became well known for “the life and landscape of New England” but isn’t a regional poet because his works are “infused with layers of ambiguity and irony” (Robert). He died on Jan 29, 1963 in Boston (Robert).
“The Road Not Taken” is about a person in the woods who comes across a fork with two roads. He states that the two roads are equally worn with untroddler leaves. However, in the second stanza it states that one road is “perhaps the better claim” and “it was grassy and wanted wear” (Frost). It shows that the other road is perhaps not grassy but more worn, therefore proving that road has been more traveled. He picks one road to take and declares

that he’ll come back and take the other one, but he knows he won’t be back. He claims that he took the less traveled road in the last stanza.
“The Road Not Taken” consist of four stanzas with five lines and eight to ten syllables.
It has a rhyme scheme of ABAAB. The ending rhyme word for each line is masculine. For example, “wood”, “stood”, and “could” in the first stanza. The masculine end rhymes goes throughout the entire poem. Consonance and assonance are used throughout as shown in the third stanza and last stanza: “Yet knowing how way leads on to way” and “And that has made all the differences” (Frost). Repetition is also shown. The word “and” starts out lines 2­4,
7, 11, and 20. In line 17, it states “Somewhere ages and ages hence” which includes repetition. Just like a song, this poem has rhythm. It has an iambic tetrameter base which includes a quiet syllable before a loud syllable.
There are a lot of symbolism and metaphors that are illustrated in “The Road Not
Taken.” The title is a symbolizes that there is no right path but the road chosen and the one not chosen. Throughout this poem, the paths/roads are a metaphor for the different choices and decisions made in life.We never know the outcome of what our choices and decisions may lead us. It symbolizes that in life we must make choices but they are not always right, and we sometimes must rely on chances. The first line states “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” Here, the narrator sets the setting in Autumn (Frost). By setting the poem in Fall, it symbolizes the downfall in one’s life where he or she has to make decisions. This whole poem is basically a metaphor, and in the last stanza it shows the narrator looking back on his choices but then realizes that it is insignificant since both of the road were equally similar. It wouldn’t make a difference if he picked the one path. No one really knows where the road would’ve led. The choices that makes little impact are the most complicated.

Work Cited
Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.”
Literature and Its Writers: An Introduction to Fiction,
Poetry, and Drama.
Ed. Ann Charters. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2013. 877­878.
Print.
"Robert Frost."
Poets.org
. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 23 Mar. 2015.
.

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