Page 17 - DENG203_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_IV

Elective English—IV

Notes 4. The speaker of the extract I took the one less travelled by and that has made all the difference is:
(a) Robert Frost (b) John Keats
(c) Stephen Leacock (d) Munshi Premchand
5. The road in the poem stands for:

(a) a long tedious journey (b) challenges
(c) choices in life (d) forward movement

1.4 Summary

Born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874, Robert Frost was a highly regarded American
poet. He relocated to New England at a tender age of eleven. His interest in reading and
writing poetry grew when he was in high school in Lawrence in Massachusetts.

Robert sold his first poem, “My Butterfly: An Elegy” in 1894. This poem was published for
fifteen dollars in the November 8, 1894 edition of the New York Independent. Proud of
this achievement, he proposed Elinor Miriam White for marriage.
“The Road Not Taken” is Robert’s poem published in 1915 in the collection Mountain
Interval. Printed in italics, it is the first poem in the volume.
Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken is about a decisional crisis. The poem consists of
four stanzas. In the first stanza, the speaker describes his position. After walking the
woods, the speaker comes to two roads, and he stands and looks down as far as he can to
see both the roads and make a decision about which one to take.
In the second stanza, he says that he has made the decision of choosing to take the other
path, because it looks like it has less traffic than the first.
The third stanza continues with the possible differences between the two roads.

The fourth stanza shows that there is the “oh, dear” kind of sigh and the “what a relief
“sigh. The sigh is because the speaker himself cannot know how his choice will affect his
future until after having lived it.

The rhyme scheme is ABAAB; the rhymes are masculine and strict, with the prominent
exception of the last line (the -ence of difference is usually not stressed upon).

Several figures of speech have been used in this poem. Firstly, it is a metaphor. In the
poem, the diverging paths are compared to the choices that the poet makes. This indicates
that a traveller comes to a fork in the road and he must decide which path he wants to take
to continue his journey.
In a poem, the use of language and rhythm as one of the prosodic elements help build up
and arouse the readers’ spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling and emotions (Norton,
1989: 163).

In terms of grammatical structures or syntax, numerous grammatical devices are used in
this poem to bring about the poetic effects.
In relation to the vocabulary and diction, Leech (2001: 5) distinguishes “ordinary” language
from poetic language. He has additionally specified that poetic language may violate or
move away from the normally observed rules of the language in several ways.

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