The Road Not Taken: Motifs

“And”

A quick glance down the left-hand margin of the poem reveals that Frost begins a surprisingly large number of lines with the word “and.” In the first stanza, for instance, more than half the lines begin with this word:

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

All three instances of “and” in this stanza appear within a single sentence, extending it one clause at a time and hence producing a sense that the speaker’s thoughts are unfolding in a steady flow. This sense of flow is enhanced by Frost’s use of enjambment (en-JAM-ment), which is where one line spills over to the next without stopping. Aside from the first line, all others in the stanza are enjambed, and in two of those cases the use of “and” makes the enjambment possible. In addition to reflecting the speaker’s thoughts as they flow in time, the use of “and” in the poem also subtly echoes the speaker’s observation at the end of the third stanza (lines 14–15):

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

One path will lead on to other paths, and on and on to yet others. Likewise, one thought leads from one to another, and on and on to yet others.

Reversals

The speaker’s thought pattern consists of several reversals. Interestingly, these reversals tend to occur in the movement from one stanza to the next. Take, for instance, the shift from the first stanza to the second. After opening the first stanza with a description of the two roads that diverged in the yellow wood, the speaker describes having “looked down one as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth” (lines 4–5). Then, in the gap between stanzas, the speaker decides to walk down the opposite path. The speaker justifies this choice by declaring that their chosen path had “perhaps the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear” (lines 7–8). Yet in their next thought, which again extends across the stanza break, they reverse their assessment and indicate that both paths are, in fact, similarly worn (lines 9–12):

Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

These reversals in the speaker’s thoughts emphasize the challenge involved in attempting to make decisions between paths that seem nearly identical, but which surely lead to different places.

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