The Road Not Taken: Themes

Decision-making and the burden of free will

“The Road Not Taken” is, above all, a poem about the challenge of making decisions in life. And it’s especially about those big decisions that force a choice between equally appealing options that nonetheless lead down divergent and unpredictable paths. In this way, the poem explores the responsibility we all take on for making our own choices. The poem’s speaker describes one such choice in the opening stanza:

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;

Faced with forking roads, the speaker regrets being but “one traveler” who cannot divide themself in two and thus journey along both paths. Later, the speaker fantasizes about saving one of the two paths “for another day” (line 13). However, they immediately recognize that one path will inevitably lead to others, making it doubtful that “[they] should ever come back” (line 15). The speaker must therefore make a choice, and they won’t be able to take it back. Yet on what basis are they to make this decision? The speaker doesn’t know where each path leads, and to make things more difficult, there doesn’t appear to be any obvious distinction between the two paths. They will simply have to decide and hope for the best. Such is the burden of free will.

The fictive power of memory

A second important theme in the poem concerns the fictive power of memory. The speaker alerts us to this theme in the final stanza (lines 16–20):

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

These lines find the speaker in a self-ironizing moment of speculation. They imagine themself in a future scenario, “ages and ages hence,” when they might recount the story of the diverging paths. The speaker has just told us in the third stanza that the two paths were equally trodden. Here, however, they imagine rewriting the story and insisting that one path was, in fact, “less traveled by.” From their present perspective, the speaker obviously knows that such an account would be a fictionalized version of the truth. This is perhaps why they add the detail of their future self giving an ironic “sigh.” Yet that same sigh may also be read as a sign of the speaker’s recognition that memory tends to revise history to support the story we want to tell about ourselves. What’s more, memory revises the truth without us being fully aware of it. Hence, the speaker ends the poem with an ironic yet remorseful sense of the fictive power of memory.

The lure of wishful thinking

A third theme present in Frost’s poem relates to the lure of wishful thinking. This theme is closely linked to the fictive power of memory, and yet also subtly distinct from it. We first sense the presence of wishful thinking in the poem’s second stanza, where the speaker describes how they set off walking down the path that seems less trodden by previous travelers (lines 6–8):

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Yet immediately after making this statement, the speaker takes a moment to reflect on the paths once again. After a bit more thought, they revise their initial impression, acknowledging that “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same” (lines 9–10). Here, the speaker recognizes that their first impression had merely been an instance of wishful thinking. That is, they chose they path they wanted to believe was less traveled. Significantly, just after they have this recognition, the speaker engages in another moment of wishful thinking.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

Realizing the mistake they’d made before, the speaker now wants to walk both paths and tells themself they simply saved the other path for another time. But really, they know they’re unlikely to return to this precise fork, and that they’re kidding themself.

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