Each and every day we are faced with several different choices to make. Whichever road you decide to take when making a decision may be a product of your own beliefs, your ability to judge the situation, your mood at the time, or your priorities. Your decisions and actions are what determine your future, so it is extremely important to consider each of your options very carefully before you make a call. This relates to the poem “The Road Not Taken” written by Robert Frost, where a traveler is faced with a decision of which road to take that may change his entire life. Through his poem Frost shows that once the traveler settles on which road to go down it may alter his way of being forever, because unfortunately there is no time machine that allows anyone to go back in time and change their mind. He also demonstrates that the decisions we make should be influenced by us, not others.
Frost uses metaphors to express how his decision impacted his life and future. “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” (line1) is an example referring to the roads as our options and leading us to believe that the outcome of whichever path is chosen is unknown. “And sorry I could not travel both” (line2), shows that he would have liked to take both roads; however, only one choice has to be made. After deep thought he has decided to take the other road, “Oh, I marked the first for another day!” (line13) And soon after that reality had set in and crushed his dreams of someday going down the other road. It almost puts life in perspective because it gets the reader wondering how their decisions will negatively or positively affect their life.
The importance of the decision that has to be made portrays throughout the poem with Frost’s use of imagery. There are many ways that one small decision could determine the success or regret we feel later in life. As Frost states in the first line of the poem, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” I picture sometime in late autumn. Also line 8 in the poem, “Because it was grassy and wanted wear;” places an image of green leaves scattered across both paths in my imagination. The imagery shows us how the traveler’s life was impacted by creating an image in our head to make the poem easier to follow.
Last but not least, the structure of the poem allows the reader to grasp a better understanding of what Frost is trying to say. The four, five lined stanzas are placed in order to present a clear meaning to the reader. In the first stanza, Frost reveals the main idea of the poem; deciding which road to take. In the