The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

Robert Frost (1874-1963) an American poet of English/Scottish ancestry, was a teacher and lecturer who won the Pulitzer Prize four times. He is well known for his poems The Road Not Taken, Home Burial, Mending Wall and After Apple-Picking. roadnottaken

Although Frost spent most of his life in New England where his family's roots were, he was born in San Francisco which he left at the age of eleven when his father died.

Like most poets who write with uncanny depth and understanding of psychic despair, Frost suffered devastating losses in his life including the untimely deaths of his sister, two of his children and his wife.

Long admired by John F. Kennedy, Frost recited his poem, The Gift Outright, on January 20, 1961 at Kennedy's inauguration.

In Frost's poem The Road Not Taken the beauty of it lies in that like most poetry, it lends itself to a variety of interpretations. To me it represents the power and consequence of personal choice and how the outcome of that choice is not revealed until after you have lived with it. It has been and continues to be an inspirational poem, which encourages self-reliance, thinking for yourself and not following the latest trend.

The Road Not Taken

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.

Robert Frost

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