The Road Not Taken", written by Robert Lee Frost, is a poem that has four.
five-line stanzas with only two end rhymes in each stanza (abaab). The speaker of the poem of course, refers to Frost's own life, and the decisions he made therein. Frost wants the reader to know that what he will be saying, that he took the road less traveled is a fraudulent position. The speaker (Frost) vacillates in the first three stanzas of "The Road Not Taken," but his vacillations, viewed in deeper perspective, seem, and in fact really are, "decisive." We are too much in the middle of things, Frost seems to be saying, ever to understand when we are truly "acting" and "deciding" and when we are merely reacting and temporizing. Our paths unfold themselves to us as we go. We realize our destination only when we arrive at it, though all along we were driven toward it by purposes we may rightly claim, in retrospect, as our own.
Several kinds of literary devices can be found in the poem. The line "Because it was grassy and wanted wear, in the third stanza is an example of personification because the poet says that the road "wanted wear," a road actually wanting some as a person would. While we all know that a road cannot think and would not have any desire at all.
The poet has also used imagery as a literary device: "Two roads diverged in a.
yellow wood" (from the first stanza), and "And both that morning equally lay in.
leaves no step had trodden black" (from the third stanza) to create a picture in the.
reader's mind. Using this as an image helps to have a better understanding of the complexity of the problem that the speaker is facing.
The allegorical "way" has been chosen; a self has been forever made, but it is only by setting out, by working our way well into the wood, that we begin to understand the meaning of the choices we make and the character of the self that is making them. In fact, only then can we properly understand our actions as choices.
