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In his poem “Introduction to Poetry,” Billy Collins suggests that rather than dissecting a poem to find its meaning, students should use their imaginations to experience poetry. According to Collins, they should “drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out” (lines 5–6). However, Collins overstates his case when he implies that analyzing a poem to find out what it might mean is a brutal or deadly process, comparable to tying the poem to a chair and “beating it with a hose” (15). Rather than killing a poem’s spirit, a careful and methodical dissection can often help the reader better appreciate its subtler meanings. In fact, with patient coaxing, a poem often has much to “confess.” One such poem is Robert Frost’s familiar but frequently misunderstood “The Road Not Taken.” An examination of Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” reveals a complex and somewhat troubling message about the arbitrariness of our life choices and our need to idealize those choices.

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On the surface, Frost’s poem seems to have a fairly simple meaning. The poem’s speaker talks about coming to a fork in the road and choosing the “less-traveled” path. Most readers see the fork in the road as a metaphor: the road represents life, and the fork represents an individual’s choices in life. By following the less-traveled road, the speaker is choosing the less conventional — and supposedly more emotionally rewarding — route. At the end of the poem, the speaker indicates his satisfaction when he says his choice “made all the difference” (line 20). However, Frost himself, referring to “The Road Not Taken,” advised readers “‘to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem — very tricky,’” encouraging readers not to accept the most appealing or obvious interpretation (qtd. in Savoie 7–8). Literary critic Bojana Vujin urges readers to look for “poetic booby traps such as irony or deceit” in this poem and to enjoy the pleasures and rewards of discovering instances of “deliberate deceit on the poet’s part” (195). In fact, after the speaker’s tone and word choice are carefully examined, the poem’s message seems darker and more complicated than it did initially.

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The speaker’s tone in the first three stanzas suggests indecision, regret, and, ultimately, lack of power. Rather than bravely facing the choice between one common path and one uncommon path, the speaker spends most of the poem considering two seemingly equal roads, “sorry” not to be able to “travel both” (2). Even after choosing “the other” road in line 6, the speaker continues for two more stanzas to weigh his options. The problem is that the two roads are, in fact, indistinguishable. As several critics have observed, “the difference between the two roads, at least when it comes to the amount of treading they have been exposed to, is but an illusion: ‘they both that morning equally lay’ and neither is particularly travelled by” (Vujin 197). The roads are worn “really about the same” (10). If there is virtually no difference between the two, then why does Frost draw our attention to this fork in the road — this seemingly critical moment of choice? If Frost had wanted to dramatize a meaningful decision, the roads would be different in some significant way.

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One critic, Frank Lentricchia, argues that Frost is demonstrating “‘that our life-shaping choices are irrational, that we are fundamentally out of control’” (qtd. in Savoie 13). Similarly, another critic contends that Frost wants his readers “to feel his characters’ inner conflicts and to feel as conflicted as his characters, who are all too often lost in themselves” (Plunkett). These two critical views help to explain the speaker’s indecision in the first three stanzas. The speaker impulsively chooses “the other” road but cannot accept the arbitrariness of his choice; therefore, he cannot stop considering the first road. He exclaims in the third stanza, “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” (13). In the next two lines, when he finally gives up the possibility of following that first road, he predicts, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, / I doubted if I should ever come back” (14–15). Here, the speaker further demonstrates a lack of control over his own decisions. He describes a future guided not by his own active, meaningful choices but rather by some arbitrary force. In a world where “way leads on to way,” he is a passive traveler, not a decisive individualist.

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Given the indecision that characterizes the previous stanzas, the poem’s last two lines are surprisingly decisive: “I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference” (19–20). Is the speaker contradicting himself? How has he suddenly become clear about the rightness of his decision? In fact, the last stanza does not make sense unless the reader perceives the irony in the speaker’s tone. The speaker is imagining himself in the future, “ages and ages hence,” telling the story of his moment at the crossroads (17). He imagines how he will, in hindsight, give his choice meaning and clarity that it did not have at the time. As Vujin argues, the poem’s speaker is already “mythologizing his self and his life” (198). The narrator, rather than anticipating the satisfaction that will come from having made the right and braver choice, is anticipating rewriting his own life story to make sense of an ultimately arbitrary chain of events. Vujin explains, “This is not a poem about individuality; this is a poem about self-deceit and the rewriting of one’s own history” (198). Reading the last stanza ironically allows readers to make sense of the poem as a whole.

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There are many possible interpretations of “The Road Not Taken,” most of which can be supported with evidence from the poem itself. However, to understand these interpretations, readers need to take the poem apart, look at how its parts fit together, and reach a thoughtful and logical conclusion. To do so, readers must go against some of Billy Collins’s well-meaning advice and be willing to tie the poem — and themselves — to a chair: to read it carefully, ask questions, and stay with it until it confesses.

Works Cited

Collins, Billy. “Introduction to Poetry.” Sailing Alone around the Room. Random House, 1998, p. 16.

Frost, Robert. “The Road Not Taken.” Mountain Interval. Henry Holt, 1920, Bartleby.com, www.bartleby.com/119/1.html.

Plunkett, Adam. “Robert Frost Was Neither Light Nor Dark.” New Republic, 13 Jun. 2014, newrepublic.com/article/118046/art-robert-frost-tim-kendall-reviewed-adam-plunkett.

Savoie, John. “A Poet’s Quarrel: Jamesian Pragmatism and Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken.’” New England Quarterly, vol. 77, no. 1, 2004, pp. 5–24. Academic Search Premier, www.ebscohost.com/academic/academic-search-premier.

Vujin, Bojana. “‘I Took the Road Less Traveled By’: Self-Deception in Frost’s and Eliot’s Early Poetry.” Annual Review of the Faculty of Philosophy, vol. 36, no. 1, 2011, pp. 195–203.