The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Name
Tutor
Course
Date
The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
Historical Introduction
“The Road Not Taken” is a poem written by Robert Frost in 1915. Frost uses this poem as the preface to his 1961 work titled “Mountain Interval.” At the time of its publication, Europe was involved in “World War I.” Robert Frost wrote “The Road Not Taken” in reference to his friend who would always regret the routes they never took when they went for a walk. Emily Dickinson, author of “My life closed twice before its close,” and Rudyard Kipling, the author of “The Way through the Woods,” were known writers with similar writings.
Primary Introduction
At the heart of Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is decision making. Frost uses this poem to highlight how a single decision can change one’s entire life. In the poem, the persona chooses one path over the other and that he claims “has made all the difference.” The author uses the fork in the road to represent life’s choices. Each path corresponds to a direction that one’s life could take hence the need for careful choice. This paper analyzes the author’s use of personification and metaphor and the time of the poem “The Road Not Taken.”
Analysis
In his poem “The Road Not Taken,” Frost uses instances of personification to advance the theme of decision making. The first instance of personification appears in the second line of the second stanza when the persona says “And having perhaps the better claim (Frost 7).” In this line, Frost personifies the road by giving it the human attribute of having a claim.

While the road may have presented a better option to the persona, suggesting that it had a better claim makes it appear to have had the intention to draw the attention of the narrator (Batool 56).
Frost also advances the poem’s theme of decision making through the use of metaphors. Based on the poem’s meaning, the author uses the road as a metaphor of life and the fork on the road as the various choices that one has to make. In the first and the second lines of the first stanza, the narrator says, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/ And sorry I could not travel both (Frost 1 and 2).” These lines represent a metaphor of a decision point in life. The persona has reached a point in his life, represented by the fork, where he cannot proceed without making a decision (Batool 62).
In this poem, the author both implicitly and explicitly points the audience to the poem’s time setting. In the first stanza of the poem, the narrator says: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood.” From the author’s description of the color of the wood, a reader can deduce the poem’s time setting. Plant leaves usually turn yellow during the autumn season (Batool 58). The time of this season varies from place to place, but in the majority of regions, it occurs between September and October. In the third stanza, the author explicitly refers the audience to the time of the day when the actions of the poem occurred when the narrator says: “And both that morning equally lay (Frost 11).”
Conclusion
In this poem, the author uses personification and metaphor to advance the theme of decision making. The road that the narrator chose is personified to highlight why it was preferred. The road is also used to represent life’s decision points metaphorically. The author also points the audience to the time setting of the poem by explicitly referring to the time of the day and implicitly referring to the season.

Works Cited
Batool, Sumera, et al. “Stylistic Analysis of Robert Frost’s Poem: “The Road Not Taken.” Journal of ELT and Applied Linguistics (JELTAL) 2.4 (2014): 52-64.
Frost, Robert. The road not taken. Shamrock Press, 1916.