Sydney Faulkner Poem Analysis

“The Road Not Taken” By Robert Frost can be defined as a narrative poem because it tells a story, uses symbolism, mood, tone, and assonance typically associated with narratives. The poem describes a person, who chooses between two roads and wonders about his choice later. In the first stanza of the poem the person walks in the woods and comes to the place where two roads go to two different sides. The traveler is full of doubts since he does not want to miss the opportunity and wants to choose the right road. He spends time looking for both roads and thinking about the right choice.
The road in this poem becomes a symbol of life, change and transformation. That is the reason the choice becomes so important for the traveler. He thinks not only about the right way to choose in the forest but also about the right path in life. That is the reason we can feel the switch of the mood by the end of the poem. When the traveler realizes that he will not be able to take another road, left by in the past, he regrets it as lost opportunity. He is disappointed because of the opportunity he missed. He states: “I kept the first for another day!” and we can hear regret in his tone. Now he realizes that his choice was final and looking at the road he did not choose, he “doubted if I should ever come back”. By the end of his journey the traveler realizes that each decision we take influences all our further life and this decision cannot be changed. Decisions we take cannot be cancelled and each moment of our life we make choices, which determine our life. By the end of the poem the traveler realizes this truth and that is the reason we can hear a shade of regret in his worlds. We can see that he regrets about the lost opportunity. “I took the road less traveled by and that had made all the difference,” – he states with regret. In the lines