Christina Koelewijn
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The Road Less Taken
Robert Frost once wrote, “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, verse 18-20), it goes
along with his style of writing. He used things from the nineteenth-century and from the
twentieth-century and involved them into his writing. That’s also the reason he was important, no
one used the style he did which made him stand out and important.
Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco. He moved to Lawrence,
Massachusetts when he was about eleven, which is also where he became interested in reading
and writing poetry. In 1895 Frost married his wife Elinor Miriam White, who became the
influence of his work. They moved to England in 1912, which is also where Frost became friends
with Ezra Pound. Ezra helped Frost promote and publish his works. While in England Frost’s
work was influenced by contemporary British poets such as Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke,
and Robert Graves. Frost’s work became dark when four out of six of his children passed, the
passing of his wife Elinor, the loss of his dog, and the institutionalization of his sister. Frost
stated “I Dwell in a lonely house I know” (Ghost House, verse 1), this was one of the lines in a
poem he wrote when he was in his “dark days”. Frost ended up dying on January 29, 1963.
For Frost there were no historical influences in his work. His work was pastoral, meaning
it was centered around nature and rural life. He did however use the fashion of the time, also
some dialects of the people around him. For example Frost wrote “To please the boy by giving
him the half hour/ That a boy counts so much when saved from work” (Out, Out -, verse 11-12),
this talks about a boy working who wants a break. Something Frost wrote was “'I told him so last
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haying, didn't I?” (The Death of The Hired Man, verse 13), it showed that Frost used different
type of dialects in his poetry.
A poem I decided to analyze is The Road Not Taken. This poems starts out with a person
standing in front of two roads in the woods, one road of them looked very nice with the grass,
while the other one had leaves covering the ground. The person decides to take the one covered
with leaves because most people would go for the better looking one. If you read this poem a
couple of times you find a hidden message, which is that in life when you have to make
decisions you have the easy ones, which is like the better looking path, and then you have hard
ones, which is like the leaf covered path. In the end the person takes the one less traveled
because most people would go for the better looking road than the not so neat road. Frost uses
imagery in verse one and verse eleven. He also uses Onomatopoeia in stanza four when he writes
“sigh” he emphasizes on the persons sadness. Like most of his poems its rhymes, in this one the
rhyme scheme is ABAAB.
Robert Frost was a poet who used tools from both the nineteenth-century and the
twentieth-century in his writing. Since no one else used this type of writing it caused him to
become a very known poet around the world.
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Works Cited
Frost, Robert. Collected Poems, Prose & Plays. New York: Library of America, 1995. Print.
"Internal.org Poets." Ghost House. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Aug. 2012.
<http://www.internal.org/Robert_Frost/Ghost_House>.
"Internal.org Poets." "Out, Out. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Aug. 2012.
<http://www.internal.org/Robert_Frost/Out_Out_-_>.
"Internal.org Poets." The Death of the Hired Man. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 Aug. 2012.
<http://www.internal.org/Robert_Frost/The_Death_of_the_Hired_Man>.
"Robert Frost." - Poets.org. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Aug. 2012.
<http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/192>.
"Robert Frost." : The Poetry Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Aug. 2012.
<http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/robert-frost>.