There is something mysterious about woods that draws poets to ruminate on (and in) them.

After Rudyard Kipling’s mysterious Way through the Woods, featured recently, here is the New England master Robert Frost on a similar theme. But here the traveller is faced with a choice. Though rooted in the reality of an autumn landscape, the poem could be equally interpreted as a metaphor for living. That ambiguity makes it deservedly one of Frost’s best known and often quoted pieces. It came from his 1916 collection, Mountain Interval.

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

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.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.