The Road Not Taken

For some reason, no matter how cliché this poem may be, I will always end up coming back to it. Not only is it now going to take over my life seeing as a majority of my extended essay is going to be on it, but I felt like I had to write/share what this poem seems to convey.

The Road not Taken seems to be about a man that has to choose between two paths that lay before him. He ends up choosing one in the end and teaches us that the road he took was worth everything he has now. Yet, what I learned this year was that the poem is a trick. It ends with a hopeful finish..."And that has made all the difference." But, what Robert Frost apparently really wanted to say was...how will you ever know that the path you took is as great as you make it out to seem if you never took the other path to compare it to? Is the life you chose really everything you think it is? Have you really reached your true potential? 

I guess that this poem really slapped me in the face. When I envision poetry, I envision it as a soliloquy of our souls...it is just our words and our most inner thoughts being compressed into the most beautiful of all words. The Road not Taken does everything but that. It is coated with the most supernatural imagery and the most incredible of all metaphors and beneath it all, it's just like..."You can hide yourself with all this beauty but face it, life is not all that we make it out to be." So, ever since I really understood this poem, I started to become allured by all poems and novels and even songs that slapped me in the face with realism. 

Through poems like the Road not Taken, I came up with a final thesis for my extended essay: The division that Robert Frost creates between mankind and nature. For the first time in a while, I'm finally inspired to write.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;	5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,	10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.	15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.	20