Poet’s Corner · Poem · 2 min

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost — New England, 1916

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood — filmed from above, where you can finally see both of them at once. Two minutes over autumn hardwood, grassy tracks and old stone walls.

An autumn hardwood forest with a forking track, mid-morning

The words

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stoodAnd looked down one as far as I couldTo 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 thereHad worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally layIn 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 sighSomewhere 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.

What to listen for

Almost everybody quotes the last three lines as if they were brave. Read the whole poem and something odder happens: the traveller admits the two roads had been worn really about the same. He cannot actually tell them apart.

So what is the sigh in the final verse? Frost is writing about the story we will tell later — ages and ages hence — when we have decided that an ordinary morning's choice was the making of us. The poem is not about picking the hard path. It is about how memory tidies our lives into something that sounds like courage.

Notice the stammer in the third-to-last line: and I — I took. It is the only place the poem trips over itself, and Frost put it exactly where the boasting begins.

Public domain. Reading and film made for Planet Neverland.

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