The Road Not Taken: Regret or Active Choice?

The Poem “The Road Not Taken” is one of the most well known poems of all time. It is referenced again and again in pop culture and in the classroom. Even if someone has no intentional knowledge of poetry chances are good they’ve heard of this one. 

This poem fascinates me because I always thought the message was clear. This is a poem about choice. I can go down this easier path or I can take the more worn and less traveled one and experience something new and interesting. What more could there be? While I think this is still a good way to interpret the poem I think there is a darker and less discussed way to read it. I think there are hints at the narrator being regretful within this poem, making it essentially the opposite of my original interpretation of the piece. 

If we look at the specific language that gets used we see words like “sorry,” “oh” (as a way to start thirteen), and “sigh.” Now it may not seem like a lot, but within the context of the poem these words seem to carry somewhat of a dreary or solemn tone. In addition to this, the time that the narrator takes could also be an indication of regretfulness. They’re lingering at the fork for a long time trying to decide which path to take. It’s not a quick decision to go down the less traveled road. It takes much contemplation. And when there’s this much thought, there is bound to be some kind of regret when thinking about whatever gets left behind in the aftermath. It also is slow and solemn when we get to the narrator who is literally telling us the story like we are their grandchild or something. Just the way the last stanza reads; it doesn’t feel very upbeat.

Another thing that leads me to believe this is a poem of regret is that we spend most of the poem discussing how both roads are essentially the same. The whole delay is that the narrator can’t decide which one is different. They were worn about the same and they equally lay covered in leaves. There was nothing noted in this poem to indicate the roads look different from each other at all so who’s to say which one was the least traveled road? To me it sounds like the last two lines sort of function as a self soothing mechanism for the regretful narrator. It almost seems like they are trying to convince themselves how important their decision was and not the reader. It sounds sad and a little desperate in how it trails off and leaves us with the illusion that the choice mattered or that the poem was about choice in the first place. 

I think both readings of this poem exist simultaneously and I am not trying to sway you either way, but I do implore you to consider this question: what was Frost trying to do when he put these two things in opposition to one another in his poem? Maybe he didn’t know there was a contradiction, maybe it was one or the other for him, or maybe it was intentional. Just consider.