Once the decision has been made, it can also be revisited, and you can gain some retrospective insight on it. In “The Road Not Taken”, Frost is telling his readers that every decision (whether in the course of one’s travels, or in the course of life itself) needs to be made with careful consideration of the pros and cons involved in making either choice. It is a gift to be able to say a lot by using as few words a she does, and we should appreciate him for the same. However, this does not make him any less great a poet than he is thought to be, and does not take anything away from his skilful writing. His poetry is simple, and easy to follow. Frost uses this device in the third line of the first stanza of “The Road Not Taken” when he writes “… long I stood”, instead of writing “I stood (for a) long (time)” at the junction in the forest trail.Īs you can see from a reading of this poem, Frost does not use too many rhetorical devices. Inverted sentence: This rhetorical device is used when a poet changes the sequence of words in some line of his or her poem in order to maintain the rhyme scheme chosen by him or her. However, the poet had made the less popular choice, and that is what has marked him as individualistic, and accounted for his success in life. As the worn out and less grassy path shows him, the decision he was faced with was not an unprecedented one others had also had to make the same decision. As the popular adage goes – those who are different do not necessarily do different things they do things differently. It has been beneficial for him to choose the path that others have not chosen, for that makes him unique. In this case, when the poet revisits the episode in the future, he believes that even though he will not be able to make the decision again, his choice had mattered a great deal in his life. However, we can also read the poem to mean that he is truly satisfied with the choice he has made. In this case, the poet is filled with regret that the time for choosing has passed him by, and only consoles himself by saying he has made a good choice like in the story in which the wolf is happy with sour grapes as he is unable to reach sweet grapes that grow very high up in the trees. We can read the poem as meaning that whatever decision the poet took in his life was a final one, one to which he could never return and elect to choose the other alternative. If we accept this interpretation, then we can read the poem in two ways.

However, most readers have thought that the poet is actually talking about life, and how in life we must all make difficult choices. If Frost is to be believed, the poem means exactly what it seems to mean – about a walk along a forest trail. The paths that the poet must choose between in “The Road Not Taken” may be literal as well as symbolic. Related The Road Not Taken Analysis by Robert Frost

The road not taken literary devices