The road not taken, a poem by Robert Frost.

Robert Frost was born in San Francisco in 1874 and died in Boston in 1963. He was buried at the Old Bennington Cemetery in Bennington, Vermont, where his epitaph reads, "I had a lover's quarrel with the world." Although he never graduated college, Frost received honorary degrees from Bates College and Oxford and Cambridge universities, and he was the first to receive two honorary degrees from Dartmouth College. A popular and often-quoted poet, Frost was honored frequently during his lifetime, receiving four Pulitzer Prizes.

Many people can quote the first line or the last two lines from this wonderful poem. It's worth reading afresh all the way through however, if only to validate Paul Valery's observation that, "Poetry is to prose as dancing is to walking."

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, 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 back.
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.