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Analysis Of Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken

Decent Essays

Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”, can be easily misunderstood, and perhaps for decades it was. Scholar Frank Lentricchia believed that in this poem, the message is that people don’t get a choice in life to pick one path rather than the other, because their lives are already mapped out for us. However, Mark Richardson had a different idea. He thought that it’s not that we don’t get a choice in life, it is that we don’t realize how the choice affects us until later in life. Although these two ideas sound reasonable, what Robert Frost really meant in this piece of writing was not that people choose between two paths, but instead they must forge their own. In this very well known poem Frost uses symbolism and metaphors as a voice …show more content…

Richardson states that “our paths unfold as we go. We realize our destination only when we arrive at it…”
I’m very connected to this poem because I’ve had times in life where I have had to choose between two paths to take. I ended up not taking either path instead creating my own path. During high school I always thought I’d be like every other cliché American teenager and move off to college and experience life away from home. However, as I was making this decision my father was diagnosed with three types of cancer which redirected my path. I currently live at home and attend a smaller campus rather than a large university because it allowed me to be involved with my father during this time in his life. The path I chose was not an easy decision, but sometimes we have to make decisions and create new paths that will not only affect us but others that we are connected to. Whether it’s a choice in life or not life happens.
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” “We must take time to define our own path. Too quickly we can find the world defining it for us.” (Anonymous) These are just a few quotes that describe how I feel about the paths I have taken and choose to take and the decisions I make. I don’t feel that our decisions are left to fate or that we don’t always think about the choices we make and the consequences those choices will have on us. Ekramul Haque

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