Robert Frost's The Road Not Taken a Poem About Regret

A person’s life always consists of millions of decisions. One who decides to go to college will have a different life from the one who choose not to go to college; one who makes the choice of studying hard at school will get a different results compared with the one who chooses partying as priority. One who decides to use illegal drugs will have a different life from the one who chooses to get away from the illegal drugs. Difference decisions make one’s life different from another. In the poem “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost uses metaphor, verb tenses, title, and diction to show that the choices a person makes will impact the rest of his or her life. 

Frost first uses metaphor to show that the speaker’s choice impact his life. Metaphor is “an imaginative comparison between two literally unlike things” (Literary vocabulary poetry IV). At the very beginning of the poem, Frost uses metaphor in the line “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood” (1). This line compares a decision to two diverging roads. To travelers, two diverging roads obviously mean this is the time to make a decision, choose one or another. Travelers who face two diverging roads are just like the people in their lives who face a fork in the road, which also means a decision making time. Does the decision make a difference to the speaker in the poem? Yes. At the very end of the poem, the speaker says “and that has made all the different” (20). This quote tells us that the road the speaker chose, which also means the decision the speaker made, has made differences in his life, showing that his choice impact his life.