Stanza by Stanza Explication of "The Road Not Taken" Timothy Sexton College

“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost is one of the most anthologized, widely-read, beloved, and analyzed poems in the American canon. A short poem consisting of four stanzas of five lines each composed of simple direct language constructed overwhelming from words of two syllables or less, the poem clearly has not achieved its high status as a result of experimentation with elements of the form like rhyme scheme, meter or even the use of unusually figurative imagery. In fact, “The Road Not Taken” sets itself apart from most other poems held in equitable academic esteem precisely because a reader need not be a graduate college student—or even a high school graduate—in order to understand any of the individual words or arrive at a arguable interpretation of meaning.

The simplicity of “The Road Not Taken” is what allows the ultimately ambiguous ending to transform the poem into one with such a universally recognized meaning that it is equally suitable for hanging on a kitchen wall of a farm in Iowa and for being analyzed by English majors throughout the libraries of the world’s most esteemed colleges. Frost endows each stanza with its own individual consideration of the titular concept of choices one makes in life and how every...