The Road Not Taken

Life, conventional wisdom says, is defined by tipping point moments of crisis in which a person rises to that challenge and must decide what to do: to be a drone or an individual, to follow the herd or go their own way. For more than a century, readers have wanted this Frost poem to be inspirational. It is, after all, so metaphoric, so accessible in its language, so inviting with its regular rhythm and clever, predictable rhymes, so direct in its celebration of the triumphant individual willing to go his own way, to follow a path where others do not, the path less traveled. Life, the poem seems to encourage, can be shaped according to the decisions we make. Life is ours to design if we are willing to forsake the herd and follow our own inclinations That sense of courage and wisdom makes all the difference. Make every decision carefully, the poem argues, because life will not offer a second chance at the decision: “I doubt if I should ever come back” (Line 15). The poem seems tailor-made for commencement exercises, the closing lines—“I took the [road] less traveled by / And that has made all the difference” (Lines 19-20)—seem to cue thunderous and enthusiastic applause as idealistic young people prepare to go their own way.

It is, however, decidedly difficult to actually find the celebratory analysis of the poem in Frost’s verse. The poem certainly uses the familiar metaphor of life being a journey along a road and the idea of inevitably coming to a fork in the road that necessitates a decision about which way to go. “[S]orry,” the hiker says, that “I could not travel both” (Line 3). Yet the poem works on the difference between what the hiker-narrator says and how the poet views that hiker-narrator, creating in the poem a striking irony that suggests that, far from designing our lives, we stumble helplessly along making the best choices we can with limited knowledge and then only much later decide that decision was wise, inevitable, and important. The poem pokes fun at the grand notion that life-defining decisions people make are guided by wisdom, foresight, and logic. In turn, it explores the dead-end logic of regret, how, given that the decisions a person must make about relationships, education, career, and family are decisions that must be done without being able to divine the outcome, there comes a point when the wargaming implicit in looking back and second-guessing those decisions becomes pointless, self-defeating, really a self-sustaining, self-justifying echo chamber of I-wish-I-knew-now-what-I didn’t-know-then.

The poem is a narrative in which nothing much happens, rendering ironic the hiker’s grand debate. A hiker, confronted by a fork in the path he is following, for no clear reason, chooses to follow one road over the other. The consequences of the decision are not shared. What the hiker comes upon in following that road is never shared, what the hiker gains or loses in his choice is never elucidated. There is just the decision that, the hiker/narrator intones, has somehow, someway made all the difference. In this, the hiker himself anticipated celebrating in the future that decision, convinced he made the right call.

But does the poet? The title of the poem introduces the tricky nature of the poem’s own argument. In a poem in which the hiker chooses one path over another and comes to feel pretty good about it, the title directs attention to what the hiker did not do, focuses on the path he did not take, taunting the self-satisfied hiker that, in the end, maybe that grand decision was no decision at all. The hiker made no decision at all. The paths were identical. The title focuses attention on what did not happen, suggesting that dwelling on the decision not made, the path not taken, triggers irrelevant regrets because the road taken and the road not taken are identical. The hiker peers down one path until it curves out of sight, bends “in the undergrowth” (Line 5) before deciding to follow the other. It is a random call, a fingers-crossed gesture based not on logic or insight but rather on impulse and even more the reality that some decision, any decision, needed to be made. Emotional, spiritual, and mental paralysis are the alternatives to choosing.

It is then not about the decision itself but rather about how the hiker will come to remember that decision or more exactly reframe it. The poem’s situation has implications to so many critical life decisions. Pursue this relationship over that one, stay in school or not, live there, not here, follow this career over that one, have a family or not. Slyly, the poem reassures. Do not worry, in time the mind itself will recast whatever the decision into a smart and daring call. Indeed, the hiker is ready in the closing stanza to begin just that sort of recreation. He will lie, knowingly and happily—he will claim he took the path less traveled by, despite his own observation when he made the decision that the paths were exactly the same, equally traveled on. The mind creates the saving illusion that life decisions were right, justified, and courageous even though at the time they were made, the person really just guessed and hoped.

The poem then is more a comedic send-up of the emotional anguish that drives decisions. It happily mocks the concept of the heroics of going your own way and argues in the end there is no right decision, no wrong decision, just decisions that in the end will be upcycled, reconstructed, and usefully repurposed.