The Road Not Taken

Study Guide

Literary Devices

Rhyme

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Literary Devices Rhyme

“The Road Not Taken” features an ABAAB rhyme scheme that repeats regularly across all four stanzas. All the rhymes in the poem are exact. As an example, consider the rhyme words in the first stanza. The three A rhymes include “wood,” “stood,” and “could” (lines 1, 3, and 4), whereas the B rhymes include “both” and “undergrowth” (lines 2 and 5). All these rhymes are precisely matched. Additionally, they all qualify as what literary critics term masculine rhyme. That is, the rhymes all occur on the final stressed syllable of each line, which has the effect of creating decisive line endings. This pattern of exact masculine rhymes continues throughout the rest of the poem. There is, however, one notable exception to this rule, and it comes with the poem’s very last word: “difference” (line 20), which Frost pairs with the word “hence” (line 17). Despite sharing the same “-ence” ending, the words have different stress patterns, which keeps the rhyme from being exact. Furthermore, since the stress falls on the first syllable of “difference,” it breaks from the prevailing use of masculine rhyme. The trailing unstressed syllables subtly undermine the speaker’s desire to make a decisive choice.