With no reason to choose one road over the other, the traveler takes one, then consoles himself that he will simply come back another time and see where the other road goes… before admitting that in this thought he was really just trying to fool himself once again, as he had tried to do previously by attempting to convince himself one path was less traveled than the other: Of course, one can’t just stand around in a wood all day, so a choice must be made. To wit, the protagonist of the poem goes out of his way to make it clear that the two paths are virtually identical- neither is more traveled than the other.įrom this, you might actually think one was less trodden, except for the next line when the traveler explains he was really just casting about trying to find some reason to take one road or the other in the previous lines and that in truth the roads seemed equally traveled: You see, while it may come as a shock to those of us that had a habit of occasionally nodding off in school, the poem has more than just three lines, and the true meaning of (most of) it is fairly obvious if you just read the entire thing all the way through. While poems can have many different meanings to different people, and certainly parts of this particular poem are very much open to interpretation, what cannot be denied is that the central character of this poem unequivocally does not actually take the road “less traveled”. To begin with, the part of the poem most everyone is intimately familiar is the last three lines:įrom this, and this alone, it would seem the protagonist of the poem took the road less traveled by and this positively benefited his life over taking the more commonly trodden path…
Oh, and it also played a small role in the death of the guy it was written about.
Most likely, it was a short piece called The Road Not Taken- a poem famous for being one of the most misunderstood and misinterpreted poems ever written, and a testament to how twisted the meaning of something can be by taking a quote out of context. Robert Frost is one of the most critically acclaimed American poets of the 20th century, which is a roundabout way of saying you almost certainly studied one of his poems in school.
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