Journal The Road Not Taken Poem 

1. Briefly explain what is happening in the poem.

In the poem The Road Not taken, the speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally worn and equally overlaid with untrodden leaves. The speaker chooses one, telling himself that he will take the other another day. Yet he knows it is unlikely that he will have the opportunity to do so. And he admits that someday in the future he will recreate the scene with a slight twist: He will claim that he took the less traveled road.

2. Explain how the speaker feels about the two roads.

In this poem, the speaker experiences an internal conflict concerning which of the two roads he or she should take. The roads are symbolic, meaning that they have both literal and figurative meaning; they are literally there in the woods, but they also stand for something else: any significant choice that a person must make in his or her life.  The speaker wishes that it were possible to take both roads, just to see where each one of them leads, but the speaker knows that this just isn't possible. When a person makes one decision, that leads to another, and another, and it rarely happens that we make our way back to try the other option again.

3. Why doesn’t the speaker think he’ll ever go back and travel down the other road?

The speaker opts, at random, for the other road and, once on it, declares himself happy because it has more grass and not many folk have been down it. Anyway, he could always return one day and try the original road again. Perhaps not, life has a way of letting one thing leading to another until going backwards is just no longer an option.The speaker implies that, when he's older he might look back at this turning point in his life, the morning he took the road less travelled, because taking that particular route completely altered his way of being.

4. Explain why this poem is considered an extended metaphor.

The poem The Road Not Taken is a metaphor for a choice. The speaker has come to a point in his life, where he can go no farther without making a decision that takes him down one path and does not allow him to take the other. This is an extended metaphor since the entirety of the poem deals with these choices.

Written by Valerie Rubio