“The Road Not Taken” begins with a dilemma for the speaker. He faces two roads diverging in a yellow wood; however, he does not know which path to take. Metaphorically, the roads signify the choices that the speaker has to make, and the yellow wood, signifies his life. Right after the speaker tells us about the two choices he is faced with, he expresses his willingness to travel both roads and the regret he is experiencing for not being able to do so:
And sorry I could not travel both
The word “sorry” in the second line, both demonstrates the speaker’s willingness to try both roads, before making a choice, and his misgivings about preferring one road to the other, while not knowing what awaits him in the woods. As we proceed, we encounter more signs of the speaker’s misgivings due to his uncertainty about what lies ahead of him. In the concluding lines of the first stanza, he tries to look as far as he is capable of to see what one of the life choices leads to; however, he is not able to discern much due to the plants that block his view.
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
The speaker, then, looks at the second road and discovers that it is grassy and less travelled by. Figuratively, the grassy road signifies an unconventional choice. It is the choice that fewer people make, due to their fear of the unknown, or due to the challenges this choice might have in store for them. Only those with an adventurous spirit venture the unknown. The speaker is such a person. Although fully aware that he might never be able to return, the speaker makes the second choice because he predicts that his choice is the more rewarding one despite the challenges.
The speaker's dilemma is rooted in his conflict of choice. Frost presents the argument of the poem "The Road Not Taken" immediately in the title itself, which foreshadows the conflict that the speaker grapples with. 'The Road Not Taken' represents the questions we face each day with the decisions we make that impact the 'journey' or route of our lives. Frost begins with the lines, "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood / And sorry I could not travel both" to present a dichotomy between the life choices we make and the regrets we may have. The speaker is faced with the universal theme of "life's choices may be regrettable when viewed in hindsight". Each path represents a possible life choice the speaker can make but he is viewing those paths from the perspective of potential regret and disappointment.
However, Frost's most famous poem is often misinterpreted and is far more complex than it appears at first look. Frost's own commentary on the speaker of this poem suggests that, despite the construction of the dilemma, the conclusive meaning of the poem is that although we like to believe that taking the path less travelled by will make all the difference, it is really all an illusion of perspective. The speaker's dilemma represents the disillusionment of life choices, new beginnings and difficult 'paths'; in actuality, we cannot foretell or look back and determine what paths will make all the difference in our life's purpose, worth and meaning. This can be viewed in his poem when viewing the speaker's perspective in the final stanza: "I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence". The sigh alludes back to the beginning of the poem and connotes the complexity of the poem. The reader is left to decide if this sigh refers to the exhaustion of the journey or at the impossibility of predicting the difference that a less-travelled path can make in our life. Thus the opening lines of the poem allude to two distinct interpretations: 1) that difficult paths make a difference and impact our ability to forge a unique character and life or 2) the entire construction of reflective commentary on life's paths is simply a fool's errand and to believe that one path defines our character more than another is worthy of a 'sigh'.
For further reading on the discussion of the speaker:
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/road-not-taken-poem-everyone-loves-and-everyone-gets-wrong
The speaker is faced with a significant life choice: to take the more conventional (well-traveled) path in life, or to take the one that shows less wear, thus less certainty. He tries to "look" down the road to search for clues to suggest what it might offer, but a distant bend in the road obscures his view. This is a metaphor for life. We all have to make the best decisions we can make with limited information. The future is not certain, and we must take a leap of faith in choosing our direction. This is the conclusion that the speaker ultimately comes to, and he projects himself into the future and thinks optimistically that the less-travelled path will have been more rewarding. He places his faith in a less conventional path and trusts that it will make "all the difference."
At the beginning of the poem, the speaker is faced with the dilemma of choosing which path to take on a diverging road. This is a metaphor for the choices one must make in life, often with limited knowledge of what lies ahead or of how a single choice will affect one's life overall. As one must often do when faced with choices in life, the narrator must decide between the more conventional, expected path, and the less common, less certain path.
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