Out of the group of Robert Frost poems that we were assigned to read in class my favorite one was "The Road Not Taken". I read this poem some time in high school and I've always liked it. I've always thought of it as a happy poem about a man who resists conformity by taking a path less traveled. I always thought the poem was saying "be your own person" or " don't follow the crowd". But after the discussion we had in class I began to think of the poem in a new way. What if taking a path less traveled isn't a good thing? Why inflict unnecessary trouble on yourself by taking a messy untraveled path? When I started to think about the poem this way I also thought about the other Robert Frost poems we were assigned to read. In each Frost poem the speaker had some sort of decision to make. And each speaker seemed to have a sense of regret for the decisions he made.
In "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" the speaker is wandering through the woods on his horse when he decides he wants to stop. When the speaker says "My little horse must think it queer/ To stop without a farmhouse near" he second guesses his decision to stop in the woods because of what the horse might think. At the end of the poem the horse shakes its bells "To ask if there is some mistake". The speaker feels remorseful for his decision to stop in the woods because the horse knows it is wrong and the speaker knows it too.
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