Engl ( need in 24 hours )

TheRoadNotTaken.docx

Home >English homework help >Engl ( need in 24 hours )

1. If “The Road Not Taken” consisted of only the first and last stanzas, we would probably feel that Frost was talking about a clear-cut choice between two distinctive ways of life—for instance, the life of a poet or the life of a farmer. The poem does not consist only of the first and last stanzas, however. What do the two middle stanzas do? Do they complicate the poem in an interesting way? Or, do they make a muddle of it? Please explain.

2. The poem is often interpreted as Frost’s statement that he chose the life of a poet. Yet, Frost on several occasions said that he was spoofing the indecisiveness of a friend and fellow-poet, Edward Thomas. Given the fact that the middle stanzas suggest that the two roads are pretty much the same, and given the fact that the speaker in the last stanza does seem to playfully mock himself (“I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence”), do you think that we should or should not take the poem as a serious statement about the decisions we must make? Please explain.

The Road Not Taken

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 5To where it bent in the undergrowth; Then took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there 10Had worn them really about the same, And both that morning equally lay In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way, 15I doubted if I should ever come back. 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, 20And that has made all the difference.