38 pages • 1 hour read
Robert FrostThe Road Not Taken
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Fork in the Road
The poem uses a traditional symbol for the complicated dilemmas in life, a fork in the path in an unmarked, unfamiliar woods, to suggest the dramatic tipping point moment when a person must decide how their life will unfold. The fork in the road symbol, because of its familiarity, is at once an accessible and inviting teaching tool. The hiker dramatically pauses and considers each path, a symbol of a person weighing options. One path, it appears, is untrodden, a path that intimidates the less adventurous and courageous because it does not immediately and clearly state itself. The hiker then boldly takes the road less traveled, thereby weighing the path in the woods with the symbolic weight of revealing the hiker’s courage and self-confidence.
If that is what the symbol of the fork in the road usually means, the poem upends that conventional perception when eight lines later the hiker himself admits the choice is bogus, that both paths were exactly the same, and that in the end his grand choice really means nothing: “[N]o step had trodden black” (line 12) either path, which means that the decision to follow one or the other is based not on courage or even wisdom but rather blind, stupid chance. Thus, the poem at once uses as illuminating and dismisses as ironic the symbol of the fork in the road. Within Frost’s distinctly Modernist perception, a symbol, if it is to be illuminating, must at once teach and confuse because confusion is the beginning of wisdom.
Yellow
Because the poem takes place in the woods, the color yellow (“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” [Line 1]) creates a discordant symbolism. It is, after all, a forest, and traditional color schemes run to spring/summer colors (greens and vibrant early spring buds of pastels that quickly quiet into green) or fall colors (a careless fusion of shades of red, orange, touches of yellow and even hints of brown) or winter drab (a stark and somber white with bare black branches). Nature defines itself reassuringly through a symbolic but limited spectrum. Nature speaks traditionally, conventionally in colors that are immediate, clear, and meaningful.
Exactly, the poet-narrator wryly acknowledges with a knowing smirk. That’s the problem. This is a yellow wood, in fact a monochromatic yellow world. Yellow, here, is an absolute, the poet-narrator offers no nuance, no range of colors. It is a yellow wood. The yellow upends expectations. Woods are not supposed to be yellow. Within the symbolic reading of colors, yellow suggests more than it means. Yellow is at once optimism, illumination, and that aura-like glow associated with things that beckon, but it is also the color of putrid disease, cowardice, excess, and imminent danger. It both invites and it puts off. It is the color of sunshine, yes, but also urine; the color of summer and jaundice. It invites and repels. Unlike the other colors, yellow does not mean, it suggests. That uncertain and crazy environment sets up the point the poet-narrator makes. We live in a yellow woods. There is no good or bad decision, there is no right or wrong way—there is the choice and the interpretation of that into useful meaning, a process that reveals how meaning itself is suspect.
The Sigh
The sigh symbolizes that critical life decisions are in themselves meaningless; what matters is how the person comes to define that decision. Without seeing the silly, even preposterous sense of self-aggrandizement of the claim, the hiker confesses that “ages and ages hence” (Line 17), he will be sharing with apparently an audience that for some reason will be intrigued to understand the logic behind a choice this is manifestly trivial, that he will chronicle this titanic moment with a “sigh” (Line 16).
The sigh symbolizes what the hiker himself resists, that any decision about the course of anybody’s life narrative only matters in retrospect when the mind can shape a life into a tragedy or into a sublime and rewarding experience. The hiker has already acknowledged the paths are the same. He has already said one curves a bit out of sight, yes, but that they are mostly the same path. He has already acknowledged he will make from the moment a grand decision, that he will boast that he took the road less traveled by, even though he already admitted he did not. When he recounts this moment, the sigh creates the readings, plural. A sigh would indicate regret, the wish to try again and this time to do it right; but a sigh also indicates perfect contentment, the satisfaction in making all the right moves; and the sigh can reveal exasperation, uncertainty, the angst of perpetually wondering about how life might have been different. A sigh, unlike tears or laugher, is both and neither; like the color yellow, it suggests more than it reveals. That is the wisdom of the poet, if not the hiker. The mind, in retrospect, will shape that decision into exactly the life narrative the mind wants to indulge.
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