Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the…

These are the last lines of “The Road Not Taken”. A traveller stands where a road forks in a yellow wood, sorry he cannot take both. He chooses the second because it was “grassy and wanted wear”, but admits at once that “the passing there / Had worn them really about the same”. He keeps the first road “for another day”, doubting he will ever come back.

The final stanza looks ahead: “I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence”. The difference he will claim is partly a story told afterwards, since the two roads were nearly the same. Frost said he had in mind his friend, the English poet Edward Thomas, who on their walks always regretted the path they had not taken.

The poem appeared in 1915 and opened Frost’s collection Mountain Interval (1916). It is often read as praise of nonconformity and misnamed “The Road Less Traveled”, yet its title points to the other road, the one we can only imagine.

The Road Not Taken (Mountain Interval), 1916

Checked word for word in the work itself.

Read the passage in the work