![]() He’ll be telling it with a sigh, though, which is interesting because sighs can be happy, sad, or merely reflective – and we don’t know what kind of sigh this is. We know that this story is important, because the speaker will still be telling it many years later. So we’re probably talking years, not months. We don’t know exactly when, but we know that it’s ages and ages “hence,” or, from now. But then, once the decision is made and freshman year has passed, the reality hits that switching schools is a lot more complicated than it seems, and it’s hard to start completely over somewhere else. It’s like deciding which college to go to – “I can always transfer” a high school senior might think. But sometimes our decisions take us to other decisions, and yet still others, and it’s impossible for us to retrace our steps and arrive back at that original decision. In any life decision, we can hedge our bets by thinking we can always come back, try a different option later. Here we return to the metaphorical meaning of this poem. Because of this, he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to come back and take that other path, as much as he wishes he could. He knows how “way leads on to way” – how one road can lead to another, and then another, until you end up very far from where you started. The speaker realizes that his hopes to come back and try the other path may be foolish. This is a familiar way to deal with difficult choices “you can always come back and try it again later,” we think. He is rationalizing his choice of path by saying he’ll come back to the one he missed later. The speaker seems like he’s already regretting his decision. The paths are covered with leaves, which haven’t been turned black by steps crushing them. It’s possible that our speaker is the first to travel to this place on that day. Here, again, we hear that the paths are equal, but we find out something new, that it’s morning. “The passing there” refers to traffic, probably on foot just like our speaker, that may have worn the paths down. The “as for that” refers to the path being less worn. The speaker of this poem really can’t seem to make up his mind! Just when we think we’ve got a declaration about which path is better, he changes his mind and admits that maybe they were equal after all. “Wanted,” in this instance, means something more like “lacked.” Then the speaker tells us why the path is better – it seems like it hasn’t been walked on very much, because it’s grassy and doesn’t look worn.īe careful not to think that the phrase “wanted wear” is personification (it is alliteration, though). The speaker still seems pretty uncertain when he explains that this second path is better. The poet thinks he made the fair, or right, choice. So after all this buildup about one road, which he’s looked down for a long time, our speaker takes the other path. But, since he can’t really predict the future, he can only see part of the path. If our speaker is, as we suspect, at a fork in the road of his life, and not at an actual road, he could be trying to peer into his future as far as he can. This is where we start to think about the metaphorical meanings of this poem. But he can only see up to the first bend, where the undergrowth, the small plants and greenery of the woods, blocks his view. He’s staring down one road, trying to see where it goes. The speaker really wants to go down both paths – he’s thinking hard about his choice. Because he’s standing, we know that he’s on foot, and not in a carriage or a car. ![]() The speaker is “sorry” he can’t travel both roads, suggesting regret.īecause of the impossibility of traveling both roads, the speaker stands there trying to choose which path he’s going to take. The speaker wants to go down both roads at once, but since it’s impossible to walk down two roads at once, he has to choose one road. ![]() “Diverged” is just another word for split. The woods are yellow, which means that it’s probably fall and the leaves are turning colors. ![]() ![]() This poem was first published in 1916, when cars were only just beginning to become prominent, so these roads in the wood are probably more like paths, not roads like we’d think of them today. Our speaker is describing a fork in the road. ![]()
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