The Road Not Taken By Robert Frost - Analysis

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.

anaphora

end of sentences

punctuation different from commas

        In "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost, it is told by a narrator in first person. Frost uses anaphora at the beginning of his poem. This emphasizes the finding of the two separate roads. It not only creates focus on the main point of the poem, the two roads is an allusion to the idiom "at a crossroads".  

       The whole poem is made up of only four sentences, and two of them are short. Those two are "Oh, I kept the first for another day!" and "I doubted if I should ever come back.". The two sentences are very important, because they show the narrator's struggle with making a decision to go somewhere in his life. He shows resolve at first by deciding on the second path, but then reflects and worries about whether he should come back. You can never tell if the decision you made was the right one until after you make it, and that holds true for the narrator too.

       The different punctuation serves as pauses throughout the poem, and puts emphasis on the words after the punctuation. In the two times Frost uses a semicolon instead of a comma, he puts emphasis on the path that is all overgrown because people don't use it. He shows that it is the harder path to travel because it is not clear-cut like the other path. When he uses a colon, Frost again emphasizes the two roads, and emphasizes his decision by using a hyphen to say "I---I" to bring attention to himself. 

       "The Road Not Taken" is a poem about how the path to self-success is not always the easier one. You sometimes have to take the harder path, the one not taken by most, to achieve your goals. And in Frost's own words, "that has made all the difference".