Literary Analysis Of The Road Not Taken

The “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is a poem written in first-person that describes how the narrator must choose between two paths in the forest. We know he’s in the forest because the first line of the poem states, “Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood.” We also know what time of year and time of day the poem takes place because the author says, “yellow wood,” and, “both (paths) that morning equally lay in leaves.” This tells us it takes place one morning in autumn since the author literally says it’s morning and the leaves are yellow and falling onto the paths.

Anyway, the narrator starts the poem by telling us how he must make a decision when he comes to a fork in the road or path. He’s sorry he can’t travel both paths. Knowing he can

The narrator is the only person in the poem and could be the author, Robert Frost, or some character he made up. The narrator is indecisive and unsure because, he takes so long to choose between two simple paths in the woods. He spends the first two and a half stanzas deciding which road to take. I also found the author profound and curious. He thinks very deeply about how the choice of picking a path could affect the rest of his life, and how he might look back on his decision later in life. Because the narrator is out in the forest alone, and by the end believes he took the path “less traveled by,” he’s is an independent nonconformist.

Imagery is very important in “The Road Not Taken” because the narrator is describing the setting for most of the poem. Much of the imagery is visual, however, there is a little auditory imagery when he says, “I shall be telling this with a sigh,” in the first line of the last stanza. The paths that divide in the forest are portrayed as fair, grassy, about equally worn, and covered in leaves. The imagery contributes to the meaning of the poem because, without the description of the forest and the paths, it wouldn't make sense that the narrator was indecisive about choosing a certain