Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” both portray how to take decisions in life. In both poems the speaker is in a situation where he has to choose between two paths in life. In the poem, “The Road Not Taken”, the speaker has to make a big decision in his life. This poem talks about a person who comes across an intersection in the road and he has to choose which way to follow. The speaker thinks wisely. In the end, he chooses to follow the road that was less traveled by. The Poem signifies a difficult choice in a person’s life that could offer him an easy or hard way out. There is no assurance of what lies ahead; if there will be triumph or failure. At the end of the poem, the speaker says, “that has made all the difference”, which shows choosing the harder path and working hard always gives success in life. The speaker chooses the unconventional approach to the decision making process, thus showing his uniqueness and challenging mentality. The act of choosing the road represents his uniqueness and the fact that he is always moving forward, even without stopping.
In “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”, the speaker has to make a big decision in his life. He has to choose between isolation and social obligation. In this phrase “Between the woods and frozen lake”, the wood becomes a symbol of life where frozen lake signifies death. When the speaker reaches the woods, he finds a world offering perfect, quiet and solitude. He stops by the wood on this “darkest evening of the year” to watch the woods “fill up with snow, and remains there so long that his little horse shakes his harness belts and reminds him of the promises he has to keep. Probably he has a lot to do in life. The speaker seeks a life without any pain and struggle but at the end, he has to comply with social obligation, which reflects his responsibility towards the society.
~Shreyans Malani
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