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Diverging roads

The forking paths that the speaker comes upon in the woods may initially appear to be just what they are: that is, “Two roads [that] diverged in a yellow wood” (line 1). However, it’s important to understand that these diverging roads also stand as a symbol for any figurative fork in the road where a decision must be made. And more specifically, they symbolize the challenge of making a decision in circumstances where it isn’t at all clear how to make meaningful distinctions between the available options. From the speaker’s point of view, the diverging roads don’t appear all that different. One path does initially appear to have “the better claim, / Because it was grassy and wanted wear” (lines 7–8). Yet upon closer inspection, the speaker realizes that both paths “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black” (lines 11–12). With no decisive method of distinguishing between these two paths, the speaker is left with no other option than to go with their gut and hope things turn out for them.

“The [road] less traveled by”

The title of Frost’s poem often gets misquoted as “The Road Less Traveled.” This is likely because the poem closes with the highly memorable image of “the [road] less traveled by” (line 19). Unfortunately, the power of this image convinces many readers that the poem celebrates taking the less-traveled path. But when read carefully, the poem makes it quite clear that the less-traveled path is a fictional construct. The image therefore symbolizes the fictive power of memory. In the third stanza, the speaker concludes that the two diverging paths appear equally trodden. That is, they “equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black” (lines 11–12). Even so, the speaker concludes the poem with a self-ironizing moment of speculation, where they imagine recounting the story of their decision between the two paths. In this account, they imagine claiming that one path was, in fact, “less traveled by,” and that they chose to walk that path. When they go on to insist that this choice “has made all the difference” (line 20), we must understand that this insistence is based on a false reconstruction of the actual events. For in reality, there was no road less traveled.

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