What is the meaning in the poem 'The Road Not Taken'? Frost himself even indicated at one point that he may have modeled the speaker in this poem after an acquaintance of his named Edward Thomas, whom he described as 'a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other.' In light of the choice presented in the poem's first lines, the most obvious guiding question for the poem may at first seem to be, 'Which road will the speaker choose?' But if one keeps in mind that the speaker will be stuck with a feeling of regret no matter which road he or she chooses, the guiding question then becomes, 'How will the speaker deal with his or her feeling of regret at having been forced, by the demands of life, to choose one road rather than the other?' The poem's title also speaks to this dilemma directly, not only signaling that the focus of the poem is the road not taken, but even implying that there will always be a road not taken, and with it an unshakable feeling of regret over what one might have missed. One of the core ironies of the poem is that it doesn't actually matter which road the speaker chooses, since both roads would leave him or her with a feeling of regret about what he or she might have missed out on. The speaker's regret lingers through the rest of the poem, so that, even after he or she has made a decision, it is difficult not to wonder about what would have been had he or she chosen the other road. It also reveals something important about the speaker's attitude towards the role of choice in life: his or her sense of regret that one is often forced to choose, and that choosing one thing means not choosing another. The speaker's struggle sets up one of the poem's main themes-the role of choice and uncertainty in life. It's important to notice that, right from the start in line 2, the speaker reveals a sense of sorrow at having to choose between the two roads: he or she is 'sorry' that choosing one road means missing out on the other. The options “blur and merge,” Orr writes they are “like overlapping ghosts.” As he evocatively puts it, “Two potential poems revolve around each other, separating and overlapping like clouds in a way that leaves neither reading perfectly visible.The famous opening lines of 'The Road Not Taken' introduce readers to the choice the speaker faces, which will become the main focus of the poem: two roads diverge, and the speaker, unable to travel both, must choose between them.
It might have changed him deeply, it might not have. His decision might have been arbitrary, it might have been meaningful. It doesn’t accept or reject its myth of choice but sets us up to feel the tensions involved in having to choose, as if each reader were the traveler. Yet according to the corrective that David Orr offers in “The Road Not Taken,” his new book-length analysis, the poem is neither an ode nor a dark joke but somehow both at once. It was an arbitrary choice, this national myth of choosing independently and bravely and becoming the sum of your choices or finding yourself. The other looked as grassy, as trodden, as easy or hard or distinctive. The traveler hasn’t been changed by his choice of a long and lonely road, but tells us that he’s going to tell that story when he’s older, even though he had no particular reason to choose the road he took. As interpreted in The New Yorker or “Orange Is the New Black,” the poem is not in fact an ode to individualism but a joke at the expense of individualist hokum. Most of us have also heard the story that says this is all bunk. That poem is “The Road Not Taken,” by Robert Frost, and its subject is familiar to most of us who attended an American or a Yankophilic middle school at some point in the last century: A traveler comes to a fork in the woods and, after sweating over his direction in life, takes the road less traveled, and it makes all the difference. David Orr has written the best popular explanation to date of the most popular poem in American history.
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