In Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” there is no right road for the narrator to take. The first two stanzas describe the two roads as equally untravelled and pleasant.
The traveller takes the second road and saves the first for another day. However, he knows that he will probably never return to this point and therefore never travel down the first road.
In the final stanza, the traveller says “ages and ages hence.”...
In Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” there is no right road for the narrator to take. The first two stanzas describe the two roads as equally untravelled and pleasant.
The traveller takes the second road and saves the first for another day. However, he knows that he will probably never return to this point and therefore never travel down the first road.
In the final stanza, the traveller says “ages and ages hence.” In other words, he will reflect on this journey many years from now. More tellingly, the traveller says that he or she will “be telling this with a sigh."
A sigh can be a sign of happiness or sadness, fond memory or nostalgic regret. This duality means that we, the reader, cannot know whether the traveller took the right road.
If we read the poem to mean that the narrator’s future sigh is one of contentment, then, yes, he or she presumably took the right road. If however, the narrator sighs in disappointment, then he or she must not have taken the right road.
There is no way to be sure. We, as readers, only know that the traveller will, in the future, describe the second road as the one less travelled. How he or she feels about it is entirely up to our interpretation.
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