However, in lines nine and ten, he is quick to add that the other road looked equally used in comparison to the one he chose, so it really wasn't as less traveled as he was telling himself. In this second stanza, lines six through eight: the individual in The Road Not Taken finally makes a decision and chooses a road that he thinks he believes is better, because it looked like not many people had walked on it before. We like to take our time in order to make informed decisions so we can justify our choices when the regret of missing out on the other 'roads' starts to haunt us.

By having the character in the poem examine the roads ahead of him, Frost is emphasizing that we all try our best to guess what lays ahead for us in every opportunity that we are presented in an attempt to find some control and later comfort over our final decisions. In order to gain some things in life, we must let others go. And like the character in The Road Not Taken, oftentimes, we are disappointed that we cannot hold on to, and experience the consequences of every opportunity that is presented to us. We experience this literally: in the roads we take and the routes we walk on a daily basis, and figuratively: when we come to points in our lives where we must make decisions for our next steps, based on the opportunities presented to us. We as people go through many circumstances and experiences in our lives, and one of them is choosing between two (or more) paths. This stanza introduces the dilemma that every human face, not once, but multiple times in his or her life the dilemma of choice.

A road not taken summary