In Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken," the controlling metaphor of the poem, of course, is that life has many paths which one can take; thus, there is a tension in the poem between the choice that the speaker has made with the one that he has not taken. In the first lines of the second stanza, the speaker indicates that he is somewhat of an Emersonian, for he "creates a path" for himself on the one that has become "grassy" and "want[ing] wear."
Yet, there is a conservative side to the speaker as well since, he writes, "Oh, I kept the first for another day!" Here,he does not wish to lose the other opportunity in life, essaying to reserve this other path as he convinces himself that one is as good as the other. However, his direction is set for him as he traverses the first path, for "way leads on to way." That is, his destiny is set by the first choice that he has made. And, it is this fixing of one's destiny that the speaker rues:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
How often one hears a person wonder "what if....?" What if I had go to a different school? What if I had gone to a trade school instead of college? What if I had moved somewhere else? What if I had not done_____, not married _____etc. One or two major choices can determine the direction of one's life, indubitably, and "make all the difference," for, as Thomas Wolfe wrote "You can't go home again"--one can not return to what one once was.
As a note: Be careful when interpreting/explaining a poem that you point to lines that support what you conclude because what you think (opinion) never carries any weight or has any verity unless you can support this judgment with lines, passages, etc. from the text.
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