Thus not only does democracy make every man forget his ancestors, but it hides his descendants, and separates his contemporaries from him; it throws him back forever upon himself alone, and threatens in the end to confine him entirely within the solitude of his own heart.

In the middle of these visions, perpetually choosing and returning, we find a speaker who is attracted to less traveled roads but unsure of his choice, uncertain of his continuity, uncomforted by a future that may or may not even be “different.” We see the double that Frost envisioned walking toward him in 1912 (“my own image in a slanting mirror”), and we see the twinned figures of Frost and Edward Thomas, approaching the roads that would lead one of them to death in a futile war, the other to a career as the most famous poet of his era. We see the place of judgment and redemption described in one of America’s iconic songs, Robert Johnson’s “Cross Road Blues”:

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.

I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees.

Asked the Lord above, “Have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please.”

We see the roads that will make all the difference, the roads that lead to more of the same, and the roads that lead only to other roads.

But most of all, we see the centrality of the junction itself. “The Road Not Taken” never mentions what the speaker finds on the path he eventually takes; instead, the poem concludes by echoing its own opening line, “Two roads diverged in a wood,” as if to return us to the forest in which we started. What matters most, the poem suggests, is the dilemma of the crossroads.

That dilemma has a long-standing part in the Western tradition. In Robert Frost Among His Poems, Jeffrey S. Cramer provides a helpful compilation of examples of “the ‘two roads’ theme,” as he puts it, that Frost would likely have had in mind when writing “The Road Not Taken.” These include, among others, the Aeneid (“Here is the place / Where the road forks”), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (“by turning down this street instead of the other, we may let slip some great occasion of good”), Emily Dickinson (“Our feet were almost come / To that odd fork in Being’s road”), and Frost’s favorite philosopher, William James (“only one [of two roads], and that one either one, shall be chosen”). To this we could add the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of the fall of Jerusalem: “For the king of Babylon stands at the parting of the way, at the fork in the two roads, to use divination; he shakes the arrows, he consults the teraphim, he inspects the liver.” And in Oedipus the King, first performed almost twenty-five hundred years ago, Sophocles gives us an especially relevant demonstration of the crossroad’s symbolic resonance: