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The setting of “The Road Not Taken” is at once obvious and ambiguous. It’s obvious in the sense that the speaker clearly identifies the setting as a wooded area, though we don’t know exactly where those woods are located. Given that Frost frequently wrote about the rural landscapes of New England, we can reasonably assume that these woods are somewhere in the northeastern United States. However, the precise location doesn’t matter, since the focus of the poem isn’t on the woods themselves, but on the decision between the two paths that diverge in those woods. This is where the setting becomes more ambiguous. Because the poem emphasizes the challenge of deciding between two paths, the setting could be understood as figurative rather than literal. That is, we can interpret the forking path as a metaphor for any decision we might encounter in our everyday lives. The poem could therefore be said to take play in the speaker’s mind, which is where the decision-making process takes place. Even so, it’s still significant that Frost places his speaker in the woods. It’s notoriously difficult to determine where winding forests paths may lead—and that difficulty is, in part, the point.

Next section Themes

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