Poetry Essay, Robert Frost's, "the Road Not Taken"

Robert Frost's "The Road not Taken" serves as an allegory of individual choices that hold a person liable to his or her own actions. The poem explores the role of individual choice in determining and shaping the consequences that a person faces in the long run; but obviously there exist noteworthy distance between the ways how a man makes choices to make life meaningful and how a man's choice becomes disavowed by the stern reality and circumstances of life. For Robert Frost, choices are of great importance as a mean to reach one's desired goal and to make life meaningful. Also this choice is the sole motivation to lead life to a particular target. Frost believes that choice is a chance to determine their fate and future and to settle on how they desire to be responsible for their deeds and actions.

Unchangeable Consequences of Choice

Frost necessarily puts stresses on the fact that once a choice is made, it turns into one's destiny. He alludes that it is necessary to make one's choice rather than suffering from hesitation. Indeed Frost's concepts of choice refers to the fact that one's hesitation in taking any decision or making any choice should be avoided; yet he or she must be calculative enough to avoid future hazard. As in this regard Grimes says in an article,

Frost claims that he wrote this poem about his friend Edward Thomas, with whom he had walked many times in the woods near London. Frost has said that while walking, they would come to different paths and choosing one....might have missed by not taking the other path. (Grimes)

Frost's approach to the determination of choice in life is individualistic. It is the individual that will decide whether the path of life he or she chooses is right for her. As the speaker (the poet) in the poem "The Road not Taken" says, "TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both" (Frost), life, may offer an individual multiple options out of which he or she has to choose one. It is totally up to the individual whether the option is good for him or her, or not. Simply choosing a way of life on one's own and adherence to it upgrades the respect of a man. But one should take time and be cautious enough to look down as far as he or she can and choose the path "as just as fair" (Frost). As every turn of life one has to face with the options of many ways, one choice necessarily leads to another decision. For Frost, the ways of life expose itself as precarious because they "equally lay / in leaves no step had trodden black" (Frost). One should not take his or her decision lightly. So he "looked down as far as [he] could to where it bent in the undergrowth" in order to estimate how it would affect his future. But at this point choice appears to be as meaningless as choice could be others. Decisions are made as they are to

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