Learn English – How to understand these verses from the poem “The road not taken” by Robert Frost

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I actually have two questions regarding this poem:

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, 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 traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I'm not a native speaker so I have trouble understanding a particular verse from this poem:

In leaves no step had trodden black.

The second question is broader. In the show Orange is the New Black, the protagonist says that the idea of the poem as a whole is that both roads are the same. I fail to see that: is the last verse supposed to be ironic?

And that has made all the difference.

Best Answer

In leaves no step had trodden black.

This line refers to leaves that have been stepped on to the point where they are black instead of the color they were when they fell off the tree.

The word "tread" means (one of its meanings) "to step on." So you can tread on the leaves as you walk along. If you have stepped on the leaf, we can say you have trodden on it.

So the speaker is saying (at this point) that that road has not been walked on. The leaves have not been stepped on so they have not turned black from being crushed or ground into the dirt or anything.

And that has made all the difference.

In this case, the narrator, reflects that, of the two paths he could have taken in life, he chose to follow "the one less traveled by," and he believes "that has made all the difference." Basically, the narrator reached a point in his life when he was faced with decision to either conform to society and live a "normal" life, or to live his life in way that embraces individuality or an less conventional existence than the first path.

The road that fewer people had taken ("was more grassy and wanted wear") was more inviting to the narrator, so he made the choice to follow the path that fewer people had taken. The narrator believes that chosing to follow the norm would have been the wrong decision.

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