The Road Not Taken Poem

I have always thought that this simple poem helped me understand and deal with many different situations and helped me to experience many great things.  When traveling on short distances or long, it is far more interesting to take the lesser traveled path.

Since all people living on the earth are faced with choices of what to do or where to go, it is no strange thing in life that we all also wonder, what if? What if I had taken that other road?  Where would I be now?  There are crossroads in everyone’s life where a decision needs to be made, a direction followed, a new task attempted.  All of us have this experience, we just pray and hope that fortune and God is on our side.  But having the courage to move forward on any path can make you a success in the end.  It will definitely make you more interesting.

I have included some other famous quotes by Robert Frost underneath my favorite poem here, Enjoy!  Be yourself and be BRAVE! Dedicated to my favorite traveling  partner, you know who you are!!

The Poem of the day

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Some other well known  lines from Robert Frost that I like:

Lines from Frost

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
– Stopping by woods on a Snowy Evening

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I —I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.
– The Road Not Taken

The best way out is always through.
– A Servant to Servants

Ah, when to the heart of man was it ever less than a treason to go with the drift of things to yield with a grace to reason and bow and accept at the end of a love or a season.
– Acceptance

Most of the change we think we see in life is due to truths being in and out of favour.
– The Black Cottage

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.
– The Death of the Hired Man

A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.
– Preface to Collected Poems (1939)

A poem…begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is a reaching-out toward expression; an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words.
– Letter to Louis Untermeyer

No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader.
– Preface to Collected Poems (1939)

I never dared be radical when young for fear it would make me conservative when old.
– Ten Mills, A Further Range

We love the things we love for what they are.
– Hyla Brook

Earth’s the right place for love: I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
– Birches

And were an epitaph to be my story, I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone: I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
– The Lesson for Today

We dance round in a ring and suppose, But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.
– The Secret Sits

Forgive, O Lord, my little jokes on Thee. And I’ll forgive Thy great big one on me.
– In the Clearing

You don’t have to deserve your mother’s love. You have to deserve your father’s. He’s more particular…. The father is always a Republican towards his son, and his mother’s always a Democrat.
– Interview

The world has room to make a bear feel free; The universe seems cramped to you and me.
– The Bear

Good fences make good neighbours.
– Mending wall

A man must partly give up being a man with womenfolk.
– Home Burial

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting…. Read it a hundred times; it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can never lose its sense of a meaning that once unfolded by surprise as it went.”
– The Figure a Poem Makes. Preface to Collected Poems

The greatest thing in family life is to take a hint when a hint is intended—and not to take a hint when a hint isn’t intended
– Comment

Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down.
– Address

Take care to sell your horse before he dies. The art of life is passing losses on.
– “The Ingenuities of Debt” in The Poetry of Robert Frost

I’m not confused. I’m just well mixed.
– Wall Street Journal 5 Aug 69

I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew.
– Writing a poem is discovering. NY Times 7 Nov 55

Poets are like baseball pitchers. Both have their moments. The intervals are the tough things.
– NY Post 18 May 58

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.
– Quoted in Daniel Smythe ed Robert Frost Speaks

Poetry is a way of taking life by the throat.
– Vogue 15 Mar 63

Talking is a hydrant in the yard and writing is a faucet upstairs in the house. Opening the first takes the pressure off the second.
– Vogue 15 Mar 63

A poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
– Quoted in Edward Connery Lathem ed Interviews with Robert Frost.