38 pages • 1 hour read
Robert FrostThe Road Not Taken
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1916A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Literary Devices
Form
The poem uses its carefully-patterned, very conventional form ironically, reflecting Frost’s position as part of both the 19th and 20th centuries.
Although the poem’s argument is tricky and relies on a distinctly modern sense of subtle irony, the poem itself reflects Frost’s faith in the integrity of inherited poetic form. The poem consists of four tidy, carefully structured quintains, that is stanzas with five lines. The rhyme scheme is reassuringly there, undergirding the work. The rhyming does not insist on itself—ABAAB—does not take over the poem in some distracting singsong-y way. But it is there.
The poem’s tight form lends itself, ironically, to the conversational tone of the poem. The poem does not read like a tightly structured poem because the rhyming scheme is quieter, underscoring the tightly metered, tightly rhymed poem. It reads more like a prose narrative. The form invites rather than intimidates, relaxing into an immediacy as if asking the reader to share that pivotal moment in the woods. Each formed stanza reflects the tidy steps of the hiker’s decision-making process, moving from the presentation of the choice (Stanza 1) to the consideration of the paths (Stanza 2) to the choice (Stanza 3) and closing with the implications of the choice (Stanza 4). That formal tightness is ironic, of course, because the poem itself mocks the idea of the value of logic and thought when it comes to making those big life decisions.
Meter
The poem uses a carefully measured metrical pattern, tetrameter, which is four counts to the line. But, read aloud, the lines unsettle. The reader stumbles as the patterns of those four beats quietly shift, line to line, some lines moving forward with deliberate purpose, others adding an unexpected shift that demands the reading adjust to that shift. Thus, the meter creates that feeling of indecisiveness that marks the hiker’s dilemma. The variations in the meter line to line suggest the hiker’s own movement back and forth, his dithering over the choice. In addition, the meter, at once deliberate and accidental, brings together the elements of any decision, a complex of thought and blind luck. Too tightly constructed stanzas would fail to suggest the messy reality of the world in which the hiker makes his decision.
The poem, however, is about that choice. The hiker has to choose which way to go. Thus, the poem’s use of enjambment compels the meter. The lines use commas as end punctuation or they keep going entirely, moving immediately into the next line, creating a sense of animation, irrepressible and unstoppable, suggesting that the hiker will need to decide. In fact, the first three quintains are actually a single sentence, creating that vertiginous feeling of movement toward dramatic decision. The closing quintain is actually two sentences, suggesting the logic of reflection once the hiker makes a decision.
The poem manipulates hard consonants—c’s, b’s, t’s, d’s—harsh and absolute gutturals that compel the tongue and lips to make harsh downward cutting motions, slashing down from the roof of the mouth, an aural effect that recreates symbolically the gesture of decision-making itself. Against that play of fricative consonants, the poem weaves a series of dreamy, romantic, soft long vowels—long e’s, i’s, and particularly o’s—to counter that chopping sense with melodic and gently giving softness. That play of hard and soft, cutting and drifting, captures as a sonic effect the hiker’s self-important drama of deciding which way to walk, a moment of truth that interrupts what was otherwise a sweet interlude in the woods.
Voice
The voice in the poem is tricky. There’s only one audible voice, but that voice is undercut, mocked, and trivialized. The poem’s energy stems from the tension between the hiker, whose perceptions dominate the narrative, and the poet whose insight into the reality of that decision is conveyed through the poem itself. That disparity creates the irony in the poem. The poem itself reveals what the hiker does not acknowledge, the silliness of his hand-wringing over simply picking which path to follow during a walk in the woods.
The poet never steps in, never mocks the hyper-seriousness of the hiker. The poet allows the hiker to create the drama of the dilemma. The more the hiker controls the voice of the poem, the more the poem itself rejects the significance of his dithering. The more tragic the hiker makes everything, the more comic the poet finds the aggressive hyperbole, the grand posturing, and the movement back and forth between decision and regret. The more the hiker insists the choice matters, the more the poet undercuts that confidence. Even as the hiker mulls over the choice that really is no choice, even as he struggles to distinguish two paths that are exactly the same, and even as congratulates himself on making a decision that is empty of purpose or logic, the poet uses irony to reveal, gently and without caustic condemnation, the hiker’s need, and by extension the human need, to believe decisions have consequences, that things matter in a modern universe that in its sheer dimension and reach, its evident emptiness and its complete lack of spiritual dimension, is strikingly out of sync with that assumption.
For the hiker, decisions matter because we matter. For the poet, with a broader and more philosophical outlook, decisions matter only because we need them to matter.
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By Robert Frost
