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By: Garin Kilpatrick

The title of Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken, is often confused as The Road Less Travelled. Once you read to the end of this Prize Winning Poem you will understand why.

2. Robert Frost – The Road not Taken

a – Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
b – And sorry I could not travel both
a – And be one traveler, long I stood
a – And looked down one as far as I could
b – To where it bent in the undergrowth;

a – Then took the other, as just as fair,
b – And having perhaps the better claim,
a – Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
a – Though as for that the passing there
b – Had worn them really about the same,

a – And both that morning equally lay
b – In leaves no step had trodden black.
a – Oh, I kept the first for another day!
a – Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
b – I doubted if I should ever come back.

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

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Robert Frost won four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry during his life and The Road not Taken was at least partially responsible for his success. The country lifestyle Frost lived seeps its way into his poetry and The Road not Taken is no exception. Readers of this poem are chilled by Frosts rhyming words, and find themselves in a cold yellow wood, looking down a fork in the road.

The Road not Taken says so much with so little that I have already as many word in analysis as are written in the Poem itself. The poem resonates deeply with some readers as it is easy to relate to the forks we face on the road of our life.

The common road is always going to be the most downtrodden, and thus the easiest to choose. This road has already been proven by others, and so it is not for trailblazers. Frost justifies “all the difference” as the ability to step away from the common path and prove your own path. All the difference for Frost is the ability to go your own way.