Road Not Taken Essay

Submitted By cocelineco
Words: 465
Pages: 2

Road not Taken

An outsider is a person not belonging to a particular group or community. A sense of being an outsider can emerge from the lack of connections made with people, places, groups, communities and the larger world. There may be choices to be an outsider. Being an outsider can also help to define decisions made in life. In the poem The Road Not Taken, the persona is shown to be an outsider through the use of various techniques such as: Tense, Metaphor, Rhythm, Imagery, Ambiguity and Anaphora. In the poem, the character chooses to become an outsider with choosing the path less travelled by. Being an outsider helped define the character's decisions made in life, because he was an outsider, he chose the path others do not often take. Frost has used a present tense, first-person voice in the first three stanzas in the poem, which reverts to past tense in the final stanza. This technique of switching the tense in The Road Not Taken, creates a sense of contemplation and reflection by the speaker which supports the general theme of choice through the poem. Similarly, the poem has a 9 beat rhythm in the first 3 stanzas, e.g. Two roads / diverged / in a / yellow / wood /. The poem reads with the feel of natural speech, supporting the idea of the persona reflecting on the past. Frost used a metaphor in the title as well as in the first stanza. "The Road Not Taken" and "…To where it bent in the undergrowth…" The use of 'road' in the title is a metaphor for journey, and the use of 'undergrowth' is a metaphor for the unknown and being blinded, not being able to foresee the future and where the person's decision will take them; tying back in with the theme. In addition, Frost has used imagery in the first line in