Have you ever felt caught between a wall and a sword? Have you ever found yourself hesitant to make a decision? Life is full of choices, and everybody has to make difficult decisions throughout their lives. Robert Frost writes about these anxious thoughts everyone thinks about before making a decision in his poem. The speaker in the poem "The Road Not Taken" uses metaphor, vivid diction, and symbolism to illustrate the process humans go through when making decisions. .
In the poem "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost, the speaker uses metaphors to illustrate the different choices one makes throughout life. At the beginning of the poem, the reader is presented a scenery of a literal and metaphorical fork in the road that the speaker faces (line 1). The split road is a metaphor for a choice. Wherever the speaker's life has taken him/her so far, the speaker has come to the point where he/she cannot go any farther. The speaker needs to make a choice like every other human and pick one road over the other. As the speaker considers his/her decision, the speaker describes that he/she can only see so far into each road (lines 4-5). Not being able to see the full road is a metaphor of not being able to see the future. One can only predict so far into what the disadvantages and advantages of a choice are. Just like the speaker, the reader will not know what the road looks like unless he/she takes that road. The speaker continues to narrate the poem by picking one road that looked "just as fair" as the other one, but decided to go with the first road (line 6). This sudden decision is a metaphor to all the quick and sudden decisions one makes like when deciding to stay in a relationship or breaking up. One's thought process isn't one hundred percent certain when making the decision, but one decides to choose one over the other because it brought something like happiness or a quick reward.
