The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Literary Analysis

“The Road Not Taken” is one of Frost's most popular and anthologized poems, showing the energizing effect that his stay in England had upon his poetic life. The poem works so well in part because of his brilliant use of ambiguity to describe the difficult but necessary process of making choices in life, a theme that would be central to his work. It features a regular metrical pattern (predominantly iambic tetrameter), rhyme scheme (abaab), and the conversational tone favored by Frost (Bagby, pp.19-24).

The speaker arrives in the midst of a forest and stops where ...