Generalitat de Catalunya
Departament d’Ensenyament
Escoles Oficial d’Idiomes
ROAD NOT TAKEN by Robert Frost
Introduction
This activity is intended for upper-intermediate and advanced students. It can be used at
any time during the year since its main aim is to practise pronunciation. However, since one
of the exercises focuses on rewriting and relative sentences come up, it is a good way to
either introduce or revise this grammar point. The approximate timing of the activity is an
hour and a half.
The text used is the famous poem “Road not taken” by Robert Frost. Poetry is a good way
to focus on pronunciation, intonation and rhythm, aspects of language that, sometimes,
teachers do not specifically deal with because of time and curriculum constraints.
About the author
Robert Frost was born in San Francisco on March 26, 1874. He moved to New England at
the age of eleven and became interested in reading and writing poetry during his high
school years in Lawrence, Massachusetts.
Though his work is principally associated with the life and landscape of New England, and
though he was a poet of traditional verse forms and metrics who remained steadfastly aloof
from the poetic movements and fashions of his time, Frost is anything but a merely regional
or minor poet. The author of searching and often dark meditations on universal themes, he
is a quintessentially modern poet in his adherence to language as it is actually spoken, in
the psychological complexity of his portraits, and in the degree to which his work is infused
with layers of ambiguity and irony.
Materials elaborats pel grup de treball de literatura anglesa – Departament d’Ensenyament /BritishCouncil
Road not taken Robert Frost
Introduction
1
Generalitat de Catalunya
Departament d’Ensenyament
Escoles Oficial d’Idiomes
About the poem
summary
The speaker stands in the woods, considering a fork in the road. Both ways are equally
worn and equally overlaid with un-trodden 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.
commentary
One of the attractions of the poem is its archetypal dilemma, one that we instantly
recognize because each of us encounters it innumerable times, both literally and
figuratively. Paths in the woods and forks in roads are ancient and deep-seated metaphors
for the lifeline, its crises and decisions. Identical forks, in particular, symbolize for us the
nexus of free will and fate: We are free to choose, but we do not really know beforehand
what we are choosing between. Our route is, thus, determined by an accretion of choice
and chance, and it is impossible to separate the two.
form
The Road Not Taken” consists of four stanzas of five lines. The rhyme scheme is ABAAB;
the rhymes are strict and masculine, with the notable exception of the last line (we do not
usually stress the -ence of difference). There are four stressed syllables per line, varying on
an iambic tetrameter base.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
•
Teaching materials: Using literature in the EFL/ ESL classroom by Lindsay
Clandfield.
•
Other materials:
o http://www.onestopenglish.com
o http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/192
o http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/frost/section7.rhtml
Materials elaborats pel grup de treball de literatura anglesa – Departament d’Ensenyament /BritishCouncil
Road not taken Robert Frost
Introduction
2