Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken, presents interesting irony and double meanings.  In an initial casual read, the poem seems to have one meaning, praising individuality, and choosing for one’s own life, the path that fewer have taken.  But, like a 3-D film, or the changing view through a focusing microscope,  re-reading and analyzing reveal different, sometimes opposite meanings.  The emergence of multiple meanings becomes something like the poem’s divergent roads.

                The Road Not Taken was the first entry in Frost’s 1916 book, Mountain Interval.  The poem is short, plain English, with nice rhymes, that make it an easy read.  Its position in the book beckons one to read-on, perhaps tempting an ambivalent shopper of the early 1900s to choose Frost’s collection of 28 poems and stories in verse, over other choices on display.  So in a first irony, a poem about walking along country paths, is partly an invitation to buy, and read.

                So you can follow along with the discussion, here is the poem:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

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.

                Briefly, what is the poem about?  A traveler arrives at a spot where he must choose which of two paths to take (two roads diverged; I could not travel both and be one traveler).  He ponders  a while (long I stood).  He studies the scene (looked down one as far as I could).  Then he chooses.  (Then took the other).  The traveler then reflects on his decision.   (I took the one less traveled.  That has made all the difference).