Making a Difference with the Road Not Taken
Life is full of choices, and there is a time in every man’s experience when he must run his own life, without the help of others pointing the way. The right to make one’s own mind up shows self-reliance and gives dignity to the doer. In the famous poem, “The Road Not Taken”, by Robert Frost, we can see a perfect example of this situation through the character in the poem. There is a man who is traveling alone in a forest. The traveler comes to a fork in the road where he must choose between two paths. Since he is alone, he must rely on himself to make the right choice. This is an important step in life for every man to believe in his own thoughts and ideas and to see the decisions he makes on his own carry out in his life.
The section in the poem where the traveler comes to diverged road, as one traveler, he cannot travel both. He is sorry for this and so he stood for a long time looking one of them down as far as he could. “And be one traveler, long I stood, And looked down one as far as I could, To where it bent in the undergrowth.” (Frost). It is imagined here that the roads before the speaker make the form of the letter “Y” which is known by some as the emblem of human life; the choice of the way of good and evil in an adult’s life. “Y” refers to dividing ways and crossroads (Cooper JC 253). However, instead of giving us two different roads, the poem presents two identical roads, stating that this is something more than just black and white. This offers grey things. Encountering a hard option, the traveler is alone in a serious debate that requires a moment of thought.
Freewill is a gift from nature to human beings, and something that separates us from animals. With our freewill, we take all sorts of risks in making life decisions. These choices can go back and forward depending on our feelings. When we make our own personal choices, it reflexes our unique personality and our beliefs. The traveler of the poem chooses one path over the other because it either looked better or perhaps gave him more pleasure. The nature of choice will come down to how we feel about the direction we took. As he walks down the chosen path far enough, he realizes that it isn’t any different than the road he rejected. Beforehand, he thought that the road he was taking had a better claim. “And took the other, as just as fair, And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear” (Frost). Life does not always give us what we expect it to, but it is important that we had the freedom to make that choice on our own.
Making the most difficult choices in life is what makes a man different from another and it gives him a high dignity. Some choices come at the highest cost, risking even life because a person is aware of their self-existence and has strong self-reliance. This is the very idea that Frost was trying to imply to his readers by writing the poem, “The Road Not Taken”. The inner struggle that takes place within a man to force him to rely on himself is an essential challenge that every man is void without. Great works of art have no more affecting lesson for us than this. We learn to abide by our own spontaneous impression of what we think and feel with no one to reject it.
Frost purposely placed his traveler alone on the path at this time. Through many walks in life, we have others beside us along the way. When a young man is growing up, he has the guidance and support of his parents beside him
.. As he continues on through school, he has the influence of his classmates and professors to advise him in different directions. Being alone in this particular situation is a necessary challenge of manhood. Frost is pointing out that every man must face important choices on his own to become his own unique person. It is an important factor that the traveler in this poem is alone in the woods. When he comes to the place where the two paths are divided in separate directions, he has no one but himself to rely on for direction. He alone must make this important step in life and the road is a metaphor that Frost depicts as two different paths in life that the man must choose from.
A story of a man encountering difficult choices, is one that most readers can relate to. Because this is one of the great mysteries that people face in life, we are intrigued to hear of another’s outcome. The traveler had only one chose to make. Both of the paths were described as equal. He looked down each path as far as he could see in order to compare each decision. We only have a few facts in front of us that lay out our choices before us. Since nobody can see into the future, this is where we need to rely on ourselves and make our best choice from what is within us. There is a satisfaction that comes to a man who has put his heart into his work and done his best. A man needs to trust himself in the connection of events in his life.
He was moreover covered with doubt of whether his choice was right or not. This effected his confidence and gave him a feeling of uncertainty in carrying out his decision. In this section, the traveler is looking backward at the option he left behind. “In leaves no step had trodden black. Oh, I kept the one for another day: Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I should ever come back” (Frost). How far could the traveler go before it was too late to change his mind and return. In this place of doubt, there is an inner conflict in questioning the decision that was made. People can get trapped by their own desires and perceptions and feel foolish if they return or want to change their mind. What was the situation of Robert’s friend, Lawrance Thomas that he speaks about? On many occasions in their outings, Thomas would chose a route that would lead to a rare plant or a special vista so that he could share this with his American friend. Time again, Thomas would regret and sigh over a different route they could have taken in hopes of showing Frost something better. This is an experience that Frost shares with the public and says that he would tease his Welsh-English friend for those wasted regrets (Thomson. 264).Even if some people do not agree with it, we need strong self-reliance and confidence, and that is why the decision between the two choices is not a trivial matter. The traveler did not make his choice on an impulse. In the same way that his feelings made him think that one path had “perhaps the better claim”, it was much more than that. The fact that the traveler was struggling with the feeling of doubt and confusion, an inner conflict, even when he made his decision by walking down one of the roads he had chosen, shows us that he was still overwhelmed by uncertainty and engaging a crisis of confidence so that a thought of returning to the beginning, the zero place, came across his mind.
In time, he recovered his confidence for there was nothing to trust except himself. The last two lines in the poem show a growing confidence in the traveler’s feelings that he was the responsible one for the choice he made. As time moves on and brings with it different experiences, a man must be convinced with the path he chose in life. There is no turning back. He needs to continue his journey. “Yet knowing how way leads on to way. I doubted if I should ever come back” (Frost). Self-confidence, as the basis of self-reliance, becomes a crucial thing in the traveler’s inner conflict.
Frost portrays for the reader an atmosphere of the mental growth in which self-reliance plays a very central role. The road he was dealing with is not merely a matter of right and wrong or black and white. Things were gray and in between, but he had to choose. It is life with all its complexity. We are given an identical road as a second choice to reflect that choices in life are often confusing. The traveler finally concluded that his choice was right. Therefore, despite his hesitation, the traveler is a strong person; even extraordinary, to go the way common people do not go. It is an inescapable point in life where a man stands alone in an important choice to make in life. Self-reliance results in the difference through the process of self-choice. It makes a difference for a man to believe that he has the choice in making his decision. In the end, his faith on self-reliance proved that he was right. “I took the less traveled by, And that has made all the difference” (Frost). He chose one before the other because he believed it would make him special as a man. The road in this poem becomes a symbol of life, change and transformation; offering a basic universal lesson on life choices.