In the final stanza of Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken,” the word sigh serves two important roles, though to understand both of them, it is helpful to take a look at the entire stanza, which reads:
I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –I took the one less traveled by,And that has made all the difference.
From a thematic perspective, the sigh is the key to understanding the speaker’s regret in the poem. Up to this point, the speaker has taken great pains to explain the difficulty of choosing which path to take. In doing so, he has explained that despite their differences, the two roads are essentially the same, though he eventually chooses the less traveled road. If we read these not as roads, but as directions one’s life could take, the importance of the speaker’s decision is much greater, and the burden of not knowing where the other path might have led is what weighs on him here in the final stanza.
The speaker doesn’t regret the choice that he has made in the poem. Frost is careful never to place any subjective value on whether one choice is better than the other. They are simply different. The regret, then, is in not knowing what was missed by not taking the other path.
The sigh is also important structurally in the way that it affects the music and the pacing of the poem. The first sonic effect is the way the word assists with the alliterative quality of the ‘s’ in the first two lines of the stanza:
I shall be telling this with a sighSomewhere ages and ages hence:
The repetition of the ‘s’ sounds here serves to slow the poem down and soften the tone. More important to the poem, though, is the second sonic effect, the rhyme. While Frost chooses words to fit a particular rhyme scheme, as he does throughout the poem, the use of sigh also illustrates how rhyme often has a greater effect than simply creating a musical rhythm. In the first line of the stanza, “sigh” echoes “I” at the beginning of the line:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
This echo creates an association between the two words, so when we here I again in the third and forth lines of the stanza, we hear the sigh echoed back:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –I took the one less traveled by,
Along with the punctuation here, and the repetition of I, Frost creates the moment of the sigh in the poem between “I –“ and “I took,” which is reinforced by the final echo in “by.” So Frost uses sigh in the poem to both suggest the theme of regret and to underscore that theme by allowing the reader to feel that regret by creating a pause, or an actual sigh, in the poem structurally.
In the poem, Frost uses the word—in the final stanza—as follows:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
In context, the word is used both as a verb and as a noun. It is obvious that the speaker, at some future date, will reflect on the decision he made when encountering the fork in the road. He will then, he assumes, emit a sigh when he mentions the two diverging roads and the fact that he "took the one less traveled."
It is clear the "sigh" is an expression of regret. The regret would stem from the fact that the speaker will never know what difference the other road might have made. He will always wonder what the outcome would have been if he had chosen differently. He does not regret making the choice he did.
The fact that the poem is titled "The Road Not Taken" further supports this idea. The emphasis is NOT on the road which the speaker actually took, but on the other. Further emphasis for this lies in the evocative line:
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
It is obvious the speaker will forever question what would be different if he had taken the other route. This line clearly emphasizes, through the exclamation, that he will always be haunted by this thought since he assumed, at the time, that he would have an opportunity to take this alternative route at some other time. He clearly never had the opportunity to do so and will, therefore, always wonder about it, expressing a sigh when he does so.
The "difference" the speaker mentions is that he had been given a choice and decided, no matter what the outcome. There also exists, however, a conundrum in this line: How can he know what the difference is if he never saw what the other road had to offer? I suppose that question would also evoke a sigh.
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