by Stella Mcintyre

Created on: February 19, 2009

The ease with which we recognize the extended metaphor in this poem in part accounts for its popularity. We are all familiar with the idea of life as journey or the metaphor of the road of life. Frost utilizes this knowledge in his poem "The Road Not Taken" but for me that is where the simplicity ends. Frost advocated not going too deeply into a poem in search of meaning. He wanted the meaning to float as it were from the surface of the poem. Although seemingly simplistic in its meaning this poem raises more questions than it answers.

The structure of the poem is a straight forward series of five line stanzas. Each stanza presents us with a single idea. The first sets up the metaphor which is then extended through the rest of the poem. The second takes us onto the decision making process. The third considers the consequences of the decision, whilst the final stanza is one of the reflections that will be undertaken at a later date.

The stanzas follow a regular rhyme scheme of abaab. The everyday language used adds to the seemingly artless simplicity of the idea behind the poem. After all we have to make decisions in life without any guarantees as to whether they are the best for us in the long term. We all recognize that making choices precludes other avenues which we may never be able to return to. Most of us will at some point look back on the choices we have made and wonder if they were the right ones for us. However I would argue that Frost is doing far more than this in the poem.

Although the language is simple, Frost's sentence structures are not. There is ambiguity running throughout the poem. In the first line we are told that the traveler is standing in a "yellow wood". Is the wood yellow because the foliage is young and fresh, meaning that this is a wood in springtime? Or is the foliage yellow because it is fall?

If it is springtime and we assume that the time of year equates with the age of the traveler, then this decision is one that has to be taken very early on in life. This interpretation is backed up by "Somewhere ages and ages hence" as the speaker recognizes that sometime in the distant future he will return to this day and this decision to wonder if the choice he made was right for him.

However the description of the wood in fall works equally well. The traveler is still making decisions that will affect his life well into middle age. I would suggest that the ambiguity is deliberate and that Frost is pointing out that making choices is a factor

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