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Robert Frost · 1916
The Road Not Taken
The full text of Robert Frost’s poem, what it means in plain words, and its best lines as pictures you can download and share.
- Poet
- Robert Frost
- Published
- 1916
- First line
- Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
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.
Best lines
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Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
Meaning and summary
A traveller comes to a fork in a yellow, autumn wood and has to choose one road. He looks down the first, then takes the second because it seems less worn, though he admits that both were really worn “about the same”. He tells himself he will come back for the first one some day, knowing he probably never will.
In the last stanza he imagines telling the story years later, “with a sigh”, claiming he took the road less traveled and that it made all the difference. The poem is often read as praise of the bold choice, but Frost was gently teasing: the roads were alike, and we tell our choices as stories that give them meaning afterwards.
Form
Four stanzas of five lines each, rhyming ABAAB, in a loose iambic metre with four beats a line.
About the poet
Robert Frost (1874–1963) was an American poet of rural New England and won the Pulitzer Prize four times. The poem opens his 1916 collection Mountain Interval.
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Questions
About the poem
What is the main message of The Road Not Taken?
That life is made of choices we can’t undo, and that we later tell those choices as stories that give them meaning.
Were the two roads really different?
No. The poem says both were worn “really about the same”; only in the retelling does one become “less traveled”.
When was The Road Not Taken written?
It was published in 1915 and collected in Mountain Interval in 1916.