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Robert FrostA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
In many ways, “The Road Not Taken” is a young adult’s poem. The poem’s slender narrative explores a moment of choice, do this or do that, the moment the path a person travels suddenly offers a choice and requires a decision. If the metaphor applies to something greater than picking one’s way in the woods, the thematic implications are at once inspirational and unsettling. Given that the critical high-stakes decisions that a person makes to direct their life-narrative are made under the age of 30, often much sooner, the poem speaks most directly to that demographic, twenty-somethings who must continually confront forks in the road of their life. These are not the trivial choices people make daily—what to eat, when to go to sleep, what program to watch—but rather the kind of once-in-a-lifetime decisions. After all, the hiker intones, “I doubted if I should ever come back” (Line 15).
Yet Frost was in his forties at the time of the poem’s composition. That disparity gifts the poem with its brittle irony. The poem confronts the perplexing, very human dilemma that people want their lives to matter, that they need to believe that the choices they make matter and that those same choices are made with insight, perspicuity, and confidence, that a person boldly sorts through possible lives to select, in a meaningful gesture of will, the life and the person they want to be.
By Robert Frost
Acquainted with the Night
Robert Frost
After Apple-Picking
Robert Frost
A Time To Talk
Robert Frost
Birches
Robert Frost
Dust of Snow
Robert Frost
Fire and Ice
Robert Frost
Mending Wall
Robert Frost
Nothing Gold Can Stay
Robert Frost
October
Robert Frost
Once by the Pacific
Robert Frost
Out, Out—
Robert Frost
Putting in the Seed
Robert Frost
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
Robert Frost
The Death of the Hired Man
Robert Frost
The Gift Outright
Robert Frost
West-Running Brook
Robert Frost