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The tone of “The Road Not Taken” is at once remorseful and ironic. As the speaker stands before a fork in the forest trail and considers which path to choose, they feel struck with a sensation of anticipatory remorse. Without any clear reason to choose one path over the other, the speaker must make a gut decision. And yet the lack of a definitive basis for this decision spawns an awareness that, no matter which path they take, they will experience some regret for not having been able to take the other path. Yet despite this strain of anticipatory remorse, the speaker also takes an ironic view of their own remorseful feelings 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.

Here, the speaker imagines themself at some time in the future, recounting a fictionalized version of the experience they are currently living through. In this fictionalized version, they emphasize how they deliberately chose the road “less traveled by,” and how this decision “has made all the difference.” The speaker imagines accompanying these words with a self-satisfied “sigh”—even though they know that this speculative account will all have been mere fiction.

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