Road not taken when was it written

I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference. Essentially, the speaker is saying that later in life he will look back in time and see that moment as one of great significance. But we can only know which choices matter the most through the power of retrospection. The speaker of the poem spends most of their time trying to decide which path to take.

But the truth is that these paths have more in common than not. Because our perspectives shape the way we understand the world, it also affects our memories. Our memories help us understand who we are, and they shape the person we become. But as we tell ourselves our own story, we overwrite our memories. What is your earliest memory? What is your favorite memory? Now think about this: are you remembering them, or are you remembering remembering them? Is there a difference?

Yes, because science shows that every single time we recall a memory we change it. Perhaps you have a photograph of a moment that triggers your memory.

The photograph may not change, but you do and your memory of the things that happened in that moment do. Our choices we make are impactful, but the way we remember them is what helps shape us as individuals. Poetic devices are the tools we can use to unpack the meaning of a poem. Here are two that are important to understanding "The Road Not Taken.

If you want an in-depth discussion of meter, check out our blog about it. So what is meter? The English language has about an equal number of stressed and unstressed syllables.

Arranging these stressed syllables into consistent is one of the most common ways of giving a poem a structure A foot can either be an iamb one unstressed followed by one stressed syllable , a trochee one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable , a dactyl one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables or an anapest two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable. The iamb is the foot that comes to us most naturally as native English speakers, and the most iambs we can speak easily without having to inhale for another breath is about five.

So the most common structure for English language poetry is iambic pentameter , meaning the most common foot is an iamb, and there are five iambs per line. Historically, the vast majority of poetry written in English has been in iambic pentameter, and it was the default format for English poetry for centuries.

You may not even immediately recognize that the poem is in iambic meter, but it becomes clear when you start breaking down the lines. Take this one, for example:. Each pair of these is an iamb! There are four stressed syllables on this line , as well as every other line in the poem.

That means this poem is in iambic tetrameter. The most common foot is an iamb although notice that the third foot is an anapest , and there are four of them. So why is this important? First, iambic tetrameter is a metrical pattern favored by the 19th century Romantics , who very frequently wrote poems that involved lonely people having great epiphanies while out in nature by themselves.

In that way, the form of the poem helps to reinforce its themes! The second poetic device that Frost employs is voice. Mending Wall. Nothing Gold Can Stay. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. The Oven Bird. The Sound of the Trees. The Tuft of Flowers. The Wood-Pile. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does.

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Sign Up. Already have an account? Google normalized the data to account for regional differences in population, converted it to a scale of one to one hundred, and displayed the results so that the relative differences in search volume would be obvious. Better than you might think:.

On a word-for-word basis, it may be the most popular piece of literature ever written by an American. And almost everyone gets it wrong. A cultural offering may be simple or complex, cooked or raw, but its audience nearly always knows what kind of dish is being served.

The two roads are interchangeable. In this it strongly resembles its creator. Frost is the only major literary figure in American history with two distinct audiences, one of which regularly assumes that the other has been deceived. For these readers, Frost is a mainstay of syllabi and seminars, and a regular subject of scholarly articles though he falls well short of inspiring the interest that Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens enjoy.

Then there is the other audience. This audience is large. Frost is not simply that rare bird, a popular poet; he is one of the best-known personages of the past hundred years in any cultural arena. In all of American history, the only writers who can match or surpass him are Mark Twain and Edgar Allan Poe, and the only poet in the history of English-language verse who commands more attention is William Shakespeare. This level of recognition makes poetry readers uncomfortable.

Poets, we assume, are not popular—at least after or so.