The Road Not Taken Exploration Quotes

From the get go, we know that our speaker is out in the woods, which makes him a bit of an explorer. We'll find out as the poem goes on that he's out here without a map, and doesn't have a plan of which roads to take. He's just out on the road, seeing where his feet take him. The lack of a map makes this walk in the road a little more like real life – we have no laid out plan, but just make turns as they come to us.

Our suspicions that our speaker is the adventurous type are confirmed by these lines. He's so adventurous that he wishes to take every path. We think that if cloning were possible, this guy would totally opt to become more than one traveler, cloning himself so he could take both paths.

Now we know that our speaker is out in the woods without a map, and wishes that he could take every path. After he's thought about his choice for a while, he decides to take the path that no one else seems to have taken. We think that if we were out in the woods without a map, we'd want to go where everyone else went because it'd be the most likely to get us where we want to go. But our speaker is so adventurous that he wants nothing to do with places other people have gone.

We already know that the speaker wishes he could take both paths, but here he comes back and tells us so with an exclamation point. He knows, though, he won't be back to take the first path. With his adventurous nature, one path leads to another, and it rarely gets him back to where he started. This pushes us into the metaphorical level of this poem – unlike a walk in the woods, it's hard in life to start over once we've made a choice.

Even though it was a little unclear in the rest of the poem that one road was more or less traveled than the other, our speaker thinks that, in his future, he'll remember taking a less traveled path. This confirms his love for exploration, going where few others have gone.