"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost is a poem consisting of four five-line stanzas. The basic meter of the poem is iambic tetrameter, with frequent anapestic substitutions. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB.
The poem is told in the past tense by a first-person narrator. The narrator is traveling through the New England woods in the fall, when the leaves are yellow. He stops at a spot where the road forks and looks at two possible roads he could take forward.
Neither road has been traveled lately, as the leaves on both of them are yellow and freshly fallen, not black as they would have been had someone stepped on them. One road is slightly more overgrown with grass and thus less frequently traveled; the narrator chooses that path.
The final stanza reflects back on the significance of this choice. The narrator says:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
This ending suggests that the narrator is reflecting not just about the roads but about the life choices we make. Even though, as with the roads, many life choices don't appear that different or radically important at the time we make them, they turn out, when seen with hindsight, to have had momentous consequences.
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