Robert Frost and "The Road Not Taken"

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if ever I should come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I----
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I remember discussing this poem in my 11th grade English class. My recollection is that we took the standard interpretation: when faced with a choice in life, take the road less traveled, the more courageous path, and you will be glad you did.

In sniffing around through some recent interpretations of the poem, I discovered that this is perhaps not what the author intended.

Look at the first three stanzas and you see that narrator sees no difference in the two roads. Both roads look the same. They both "equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black." Therefore, he cannot consciously at that point pick the road less traveled because neither one looks less traveled than the other.

So he picks one at random, and it is only years later that he rationalizes in an act of self-aggrandizement that he consciously selected the road less traveled. It is easy to look back and romanticize our choices when we were probably just guessing at the time.

We fool ourselves into thinking that life is a series of rational decisions between good and bad choices whereas the truth is that most of the time we don't know which path is best and our choices are often just uneducated guesses and hopes.