What is gained by “roads”? Primarily two things. First, a road, unlike a path, is necessarily man-made. Dante may have found his life similarly changed “in a dark wood,” but Frost takes things a step further by placing his speaker in a setting that combines the natural world with civilization—yes, the traveler is alone in a forest, but whichever way he goes, he follows a course built by other people, one that will be taken, in turn, by still other people long after he has passed. The act of choosing may be solitary, but the context in which it occurs is not. Second, as Wendell Berry puts it, a path differs from a road in that it “obeys the natural contours; such obstacles as it meets it goes around.” A road is an assertion of will, not an accommodation. So the speaker’s decision, when it comes, whatever it is, will be an act of will that can occur only within the bounds of another such act—a way of looking at the world that simultaneously undercuts and strengthens the idea of individual choice.

This doubled effect continues in the poem’s second and third lines, which summarize the dilemma around which “The Road Not Taken” is constructed: “And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler . . .” Frost often likes to use repetition and its cousin, redundancy, to suggest the complex contours of seemingly simple concepts. In this case, we have what seems like the most straightforward proposition imaginable: If a road forks, a single person can’t “travel both” branches. But the concept is oddly extended to include the observation that one can’t “travel both” and “be one traveler,” which seems superfluous. After all, Frost might more easily and obviously have written the stanza like so (emphasis mine):

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

To where they ended, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth . . .