Moral consequences. The speaker isn’t choosing between, on the one hand, a road that will enable him to save the life of a person he knows and, on the other, a road that will enable him to save the lives of fifteen strangers.

Multiple options. There are only two roads, not three or four. And the two roads don’t offer obvious additional options, as might be the case if, for instance, the speaker could see that one of the roads branched into two more roads only a hundred feet down the trail.

Options that lack differentiating qualities. True, the two roads are worn “really about the same” and “equally lay / In leaves,” but this doesn’t mean the roads are indiscernible. By contrast, consider choosing among cans of Campbell’s tomato soup at the grocery store, or among individual pieces of white paper in a five-hundred-sheet pack.

Trivial options. For instance, the speaker isn’t debating whether to begin walking by stepping with his right foot or with his left, or what tune to whistle as he strolls on. Yet consider how many of our daily decisions are of precisely this minor sort.

A choice not to choose. At no point does Frost suggest that the speaker might simply turn around or sit down or blaze a trail separate from the roads (an action that would arguably be more in keeping with the poem’s traditional interpretation as a monument to individualism).

So if all these potential dimensions of choice (a list that could easily be longer) are missing from the poem, what are we left with? A kind of idealized or “pure” choice. A choice from which most of the factors that can complicate or undermine individual decision making have been deliberately withheld. A choice, then, that seems to occur in perfect laboratory conditions for testing a very old idea: that a free agent acting freely can make a decision that matters.

____