Page 12 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Unit 1: The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Lines 11–12 Notes
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
The traveller again says that the paths are equal. Its morning and it seems like the poet is
the first person travelling to this place in the morning hours. The poet says that the paths
are covered with leaves, which haven’t become black by steps crushing them.

Line 13
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
It looks like the traveller is already regretting his decision. He’s saying that he’ll return
later to take the path he has missed. It indicates that he is trying to justify his decision.
With an “Oh” at the beginning and an exclamation point at the end, Frost wants the reader
to see the irony that he has no way to go back.
Lines 14–15
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

The poet realizes that his hopes to come back and try the other path may never come true.
The poet knows how “way leads on to way” – how one road leads to another, and then
another, till you reach far away from where you began travelling. He doesn’t think he’ll
ever be able to return to take the other road which he desires to take. The metaphorical
meaning of this poem is that in any decision we make, we think that we can return to try
a different option sometime later. However at times our decisions take us to other decisions,
and gets impossible for us to retrace our steps and go back to the original decision.

Lines 16–17
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Now we jump forward in time to a few years from now. We don’t know exactly when, but
we know that it’s ages and ages “hence,” or, from now. The usage of the word the “sigh”
indicates that the man in the story looks into the future and thinks how happy he is that he
took the road less travelled. This story holds immense significant, because the poet will
narrate this story many years later.

Line 18
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
This line is a repetition of the first line of the poem, with the addition of the words “and I”
and the removal of the word “yellow”. This repetition reminds us what’s important in the
poem and helps to conclude the poem. It emphasises on the concept of making a choice
between two different paths. The usage of words “and I” indicate that whatever the poet is
about to say next is significant.
Line 19

I took the one less traveled by,
The poet, in this line, tells his readers that he took the road less travelled by. The declaration
of the poet could be triumphant or regretful.

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