The poem, The Road Not Taken (1916), written by Robert Frost, was inspired by Edward Thomas who was his friend. By incorporating experiences of walking with Thomas, encountering pathways and deciding which ones to take, Frost utilises this as an extended metaphor for life in his poem The Road Not Taken. More specifically, he exhibits various kinds of techniques to criticise the action of regret that follows making a decision. The author uses the extended metaphor of roads as life choices to highlight life as a journey and criticise the nature of regret as a human quality. Also, to effectively convey the deeper meaning of the poem, he portrays techniques such as tone shift and rhyming pattern.
Frost attempts to persuade readers to stop regretting
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In this poem, rhyming was depicted but it was special as it was different with other normal and general rhyming patterns. In every five stanzas of the poem, the pattern was similar. For example, in the first stanza, the words at the end of each line were “wood/both/stood/could/undergrouth”, which demonstrates a particular pattern. First, third and fourth line rhymes together and the rest rhymes. This pattern is not common and not many poems followed this structure. The writer intended this to highlight the message of the poem and impart a new point. He was indicating that when people determine, they should keep going forward with the decision that they think is right as it is their own life as the narrator did in the poem. In addition, the depiction of various punctuations in different situations emphasise the theme that the reader perceives. He mainly utilises commas, semi-colons, and full stops. Commas and semi-colons lengthen the sentence and the meaning. Full stops imply that the thought and the sentence have ended. These highlights both surface and deeper meaning of each line in the poem. In line two, “And be one traveller, long I stood,”, the comma emphasises the meaning of the sentence which is that the narrator is in a anguish. The use of these