Brendan Gonzalez

 Poetry Explication

 Professor Scanlan

                                                     The Road Not Taken 

In the poem “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost the speaker goes right into decision making, choosing a road. As you read this poem Frost gives you the feeling of deciding between two ways to go in life which could be very hard thing to do for anybody. Going down the wrong road could literally cost you a life time and that’s something you can’t get back no matter what and you’ll only get to look back down that road and reminisce on why you took that certain road and don’t regret it or be upset with it because you can’t go back on that decision that’s life. Frost does a great job at giving you a feeling of the roads that were walked on by others but most importantly he really paints a picture in your head of the roads and what it would look like, “ two roads diverged in a yellow wood” I feel everybody sees that picture right away and it pops up in your head vividly on what it may look like. 

The two lines I decided to explicate from “The Road Not Taken” are in the last stanza the first two lines, “I shall be telling this with a sigh” and “Somewhere ages and ages hence”. The reason I decided on these two lines are one, I feel line one is a feeling of regret “I shall be telling this with a sigh” when you see the word sigh or someone sign two ideas comes to mind. One, a sigh of sadness and that’s what came to my mind first before anything else when I’m sad or have something on my mind I’ll let a sigh out in this case his sigh sounds like regret he’s going to tell you this with a sigh of regret. The second way you can take this sigh could be a sigh of relief a chance to look back on the decision made and be happy it went the way it did down the road. You can take it either way you want both ideas are good ideas to go with. Line two “Somewhere ages and ages hence” when he say this line I see someone down the line looking back at everything years from when that big decision was mad to take either road going left or right and really stick to it and walk down that path and reflect on how it went for you. 

Within our lives we will need to make a choice that you’ll probably only get to make once and it’s up to you to look down that each road left and right to see which one will do you best down in life. Once that choice is made and you walked that path for a while we will all look back and see how it went for us many will have that sigh of relief and be proud of that choice, while many are going to have that sigh of sadness and regret it all years down the line and all you’ll be able to do is look back and regret.