Point of View

"The Road Not Taken" is told from a first-person point of view through the unnamed speaker, "I." The speaker recounts the experience of approaching two paths on a walk and being faced with the decision to choose one. The majority of the poem maintains this relatively straightforward perspective, but there are a number of instances in the first three stanzas that work to undermine the speaker's agency in his own story. The first occurrence of such undermining appears in the very first line, "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood" (1). Here, the poem opens not with the voice of the speaker with whom we will become familiar, but instead with the image of the choice laid in front of him. It is not until the second line, "And sorry I could not travel both" (2), that readers understand that this image has been presented through a...