Composition

To better understand “The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, it is important to deal both with its outer composition and inner compositio…

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Outer composition

The poem is comprised of four stanzas, with 20 lines in total. Each stanza has five lines. The poem has an iambic rhythm, and it is written in an iambic tetrameter, which means that a line consists of four iambic feet. If the rhythm is iambic, then the initial syllable is unstressed, and the following one is stressed. Here is an examp…

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Inner composition

The poem presents the way indecision may come to affect a person’s life and bring about regrets.

The first stanza presents an anonymous speaker in front of two roads in a wood. Eventually, the speaker will have to make a decision to take a road, but, for now, he weighs his options and begins to analyze the first road:

And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; (ll. 4-5)

The second stanza shows the speaker focusing on the second road. He has the impression …