jspaid1111
  Junior Member

As an English teacher, and I'm also indebeted to a college Englis professor I had for this understanding, a closer reading of this poem reveals it not to actually be about any "choices" in life, but rather about how we misrepresent those choices to ourselves and others through the psychological mechanism of denial. In the second stanza of the poem Frost acutally tells us that the paths are just the same. He says that he "took the other, as just as fair", in other words he choose the other path in the woods, but the one he didn't choose was "just as fair", or just as beautiful or good. And then at the end of the stanza he says that the walking upon them has "worn them really about the same". He makes it clear that the paths are practically identical, but in the last stanza of the poem he says that he will later tell people that "I took the one less travelled by, and that has made all the difference". This is in fact a lie, but it's a lie of deception to himself, first and foremost, as the phrase "that has made all the difference" shows us that he wants to seem to himself--and yes in the eyes of others as well--to have made a brave, courageous choice in life that most others would be unable to make. And of course we all do this to some extent, where we tell the stories of our lives, to others and even to ourselves, in slightly positively exaggerated ways to make ourselves, and perhaps life itself, a little more interesting, a little more exciting, a little more meaningful. Frost understood human nature intensely, which of course is what made him such a powerful poet, and here as in so many of his poems he uses the simple device of a quiet walk in the woods to mirror our deepest urges and motivations back to ourselves. more »