THIS IS ONLY the first stanza of “The Road Not Taken,” and already its lines seem papered over with potential interpretations, some more plausible than others, but none of which can be discarded. One can see why Thomas said he found the poem “staggering.” But then Frost takes things a step further. Having sketched the speaker and his potential choice in all their entangled ambiguity, he undermines the idea that there is really a choice to be made at all:

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

The speaker wants to see the paths as different (one has “perhaps the better claim”) but admits that the distinctions, if they even exist, are minute (“the passing there / Had worn them really about the same”). The sameness of the roads will later be revised in the story the speaker says he’ll be telling “ages and ages hence”—as he famously observes, he’ll claim to have taken “the one less traveled by.”

Two things are worth pausing over in these stanzas. First, why is the physical appearance of the roads mentioned in the first place? We typically worry more about where roads go than what they look like. (Here again it’s worth contrasting “road” with “path” or “trail,” neither of which implies a destination as strongly as “road.”) So if all Frost intended was to parody a kind of romantic longing for missed opportunities, wouldn’t it be more effective to imply that the roads reached the same location? As in:

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And making perhaps the better case,

Because it seemed to lead elsewhere,

Though at day’s end each traveler there

Would finish in the selfsame place.

Second, if you’re determined to make the appearance of the roads the central issue, why make that appearance solely a function of how much travel each road had received? Why not talk about how one road was sunnier or wider or stonier or steeper? “I took the one less traveled by” is often assumed to mean “I took the more difficult road,” but this isn’t necessarily true in either a literal or metaphorical sense. In scenic areas, after all, the less traveled paths are usually the least interesting and challenging (think of an emergency-vehicle access road in a state park), and if we imagine “roads” as referring to “life choices,” the array of decisions that are “less traveled” yet both easy and potentially harmful is nearly endless (drug abuse, tax evasion, and so on). So if the idea was to suggest that the speaker wants to perceive his chosen road as not just lonely, but demanding, why not make a more direct statement that would lead to a more direct conclusion, like: