Thursday, May 11, 2017

Does the poem "The Road Not Taken" contain only one theme ?

Like most texts, this poem conveys a few different themes. For one, the poem illuminates the idea that there are no truly unique choices in life. If the two roads in the poem symbolize choices, then neither choice is more unusual or made less often because "the passing there / Had worn them really about the same." In other words, about the same number of people have taken each road. The second road is "just as fair" as the first, and when the narrator came to the fork in the road, "both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black." Therefore, each road has been traveled about the same number of times, and though the roads may look different from one another—one bends in the undergrowth and one is more grassy—they are equally worn from other travelers. These ideas lead to another, related theme: one should not base one's decisions on what other people have done because, ultimately, it doesn't matter what others did or didn't choose.
Further, the poem conveys the theme that people very much want to believe that their choices have made a difference in the direction their lives have taken. Moreover, and related, people want to believe that they are unique. In the final stanza, the narrator says that, in the future, he plans to tell people that he "took the [road] less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference." However, we know that there is no road less traveled, as does the speaker. Therefore, he plans to lie. Perhaps he will lie because he wants to believe that his choice was unique, that he is not like everyone else in the crowd. Perhaps he will lie because he knows that this is what other people want to believe. Either way, we see that people desire to think of themselves and to be thought of as unique.

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