How To Write A Rhetorical Analysis On The Road Not Taken

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost is an intelligent poem about separating yourself from the rest and finding out who you are by making your own choices. Frost uses paths in the woods to describe his thought process when it comes to decision making and his success that stems directly from those choices. It’s about branching away from the influence of mob mentality and living life how you want. The metaphorical paths in Frost’s poem directly correlate to real life and the choices that people make throughout their life, their “paths”. Therefore, The Road Not Taken is a metaphorical poem explaining the importance of taking time to think about your decisions, following the paths that you want to regardless if it is not typically chosen, and recognizing

He was destined to go down one and regretted not being able to take both, so he sacrificed one for the other” (Spacey). I found this to be a great part of his analysis because it made me think about how the man in the forest was wise in ignoring what could have happened instead of dwelling and “returning another day”. He also brings up that the ending of the poem does not necessarily mean that “all the difference” is a good thing, which is the reality. Taking the path that isn’t normal does not guarantee that it will work out. This is interesting because if the reader does not think deeper about the poem, it can create a fallacy within the reader that always choosing the less taken path is a good thing. It’s important for the reader to understand that they road less traveled makes the difference, but it isn’t always a good difference, and that’s why the main message is about decision making and being who you are. Calling back to Ashley Robinson’s analysis, we can see similar points made as well as new ideas introduced. She mentions the power of hindsight in the poem, where whether the choice was good or bad can only be determined retrospectively. She states, “When we’re making choices in life, they might seem inconsequential or like they’re not that big of a deal. But once time passes and we’ve journeyed down our path a little farther, we can look back into the past and see which choices have shaped us the most” (Robinson) which I think is a wonderful explanation of the consequences (good or bad) of our actions and how we eventually realize that the choices we make that we don’t think are important in the moment end up being reflected upon as life