Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

These lines come from Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” written in the 1910s and first published in 1915, then collected in Mountain Interval (1916). Frost composed the poem after walking with his friend Edward Thomas in England; Thomas often regretted not taking the “other” path on their rambles, and Frost later described the poem as a kind of gentle “private jest” about that habit. Although the poem is frequently quoted as a celebration of rugged individualism, Frost’s own remarks and the poem’s tone (including its future “sigh”) suggest a more ironic meditation on how people narrate their choices after the fact.

The speaker faces a fork in the woods and chooses one path, later claiming it “made all the difference.” Yet the poem complicates that claim: the two roads are described as “really about the same,” and the speaker admits he will probably never return to test the alternative. The closing lines dramatize how humans retrospectively shape life into a story of decisive, identity-making choices, even when the options were nearly equivalent and the outcome unknowable at the time. The poem’s power lies in this tension between choice as lived (uncertain, contingent) and choice as remembered (given meaning by narrative and emotion).

1) “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both …” (opening line as commonly quoted from the poem)
2) “I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” (common version omitting the em dash and repeated “I”)
3) “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— / I took the one less traveled by …” (often quoted with the line break after “I—”)