In the Library
The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost, 1916
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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In the public domain in the United States only: this edition is sold and read there and nowhere else.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
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- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
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About the book
Two roads diverge in a yellow wood, and a traveler stands a long while where they part, sorry he cannot walk both. Everyone knows how it ends: he takes the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference. But read the lines again. He admits the two paths are worn "really about the same," that the leaves that morning lay equal on each, and that the heroic sigh he imagines giving "ages and ages hence" is a story he is already rehearsing, before he has gone anywhere. The Road Not Taken is the most misread poem in English, and that is its quiet genius: it catches a mind in the act of inventing the meaning of its own life. Frost wrote it to tease a friend who agonized over every turning they had not taken. The trap is that you will finish it feeling vindicated, and never notice you were the one being teased.