The Road Not Taken

The third stanza deals with our coping of a decision once it’s been made. Take line 13, “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” The exclamation point is important here because it portrays excitement and an interesting optimistic approach to the situation. This line is the narrator’s way of comforting his own uneasy feeling about the situation. The narrator has made his choice, but still has no idea what the consequence of it will be, and as a comforting thought he decides that he can always come back and try the other path in the future, thereby avoiding any consequences of having to stick with an uneducated choice. Clearly this is a comparison to problems we face in decision making every day. A decision is not so hard if you know you can always come back to try the alternative, however as the narrator knows, this is not always an option. If it were always an option than life would lose its unpredictable excitement, and the narrator acknowledges this in the following lines, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back.” The last two lines are that little voice inside us saying “you know your stuck with this decision, better make the best of it.” By not clearly showing regret, uncertainty, or excitement Frost speaks volumes on the human psyche.