Life's Dilemmas in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost (Essay Sample)

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Life’s Dilemmas in “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
Life is a dilemma. The decisions that people make are largely a gamble with fate, for they don’t understand what possibilities each available option represents. The poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost portrays this fact by examining the choices about the unknown that people have to make in their day-to-day lives.
The opening lines of the poem makes this point clear:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood/
… long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could/
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other (lines 1-6).
The speaker’s confession that he took the second path after looking down the first one “to where it bent in the undergrowth” suggests that he made a decision without knowing what lay beyond the bend. But why did he take the second path without scouting it out? He answer is in the next lines where he says that both roads were similar in every respect: none was more travelled than the other, and in that morning, both were covered equally by untrodden leaves. This information reveals the dilemma facing the speaker. He has no information that he can use to decide on which is the better road to take. This situation of indecision is suggested by the long time he stood at the crossroads contemplating.
Regardless, the speaker takes on one road with the self-comforting thought that he had taken the less traveled one, and that he would come back to take the other road another day. This is despite being aware that he may never get that opportunity. In life, there are moments when two opportunities come up at the same time, but only one may be taken. This is the situation that the speaker portrays in his dilemma over which road to choose. The speaker may not choose one road because he knows something about it; his choice is a gamble, for he does not know what lies ahead of the chosen one, or behind the bend of the untaken one. In this way, the poem portrays the realities of life; that although people are free to choose, they do not know what exactly they are choosing between.
It is important to note that the poem is not really about the road that the speaker took, but the one not taken. Looking into the future, he anticipates a moment when he may regret his decision because he will not know what opportunities he had missed by not taking “the road not taken.” What opportunities lay hidden behind the bend in the undergrowth? Will he miss better opportunities by not venturing out to find out? These are the questions that places the speaker in a dilemma. At the same time, setting out to find out if the road not taken had better opportunities means he would forego the chance to discover about the other road, the one he eventually took. The lesson here is that life presents individuals with several opportunities, in which one opportunity, the one not taken, will always remain a mystery, and perhaps a source of regret. What if one had gone to law school and not business school? What better opportunities would playing professional football have brought instead of going to college? Could have one had a happier marriage had he married his high school girlfriend and not the one he met after college? How better could it have been if one had divorced and remarried? What about the abortion one secured because otherwise she couldn’t have finished college and become a CEO, although the abortion destroyed her womb as a result of which she’ll never know the happiness of motherhood? Could she do it differently if the clock of time was rewound? In “The Road Not Taken,” the speaker explores these situations by anticipating a moment when he may regret for not taking the road he looked down up to where it had a bent, but did not take it. The fact that the speaker refused to take this road even without knowing what lay ahead, beyond the bend, suggests that people are confronted with decision-making situations in which they must make a choice even without knowing beforehand what they are choosing between. The alternatives present unknown possibilities, and choosing one means giving up the other and living without knowing what they had given up.
The closing lines suggest that the speaker will regret his inability to take both roads and discover the secrets and opportunities they held. He reckons that one day in the future, perhaps in old age, he shall look back and say that:
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 (17-20).
This revelation of his intentions suggests a conspiracy to rewrite history and make a legend out of it. In the initial stanzas he confesses that in that morning, the two roads were exactly similar, none more travelled than the other. However, he plans to c...