Symbolism in the road not taken series#

Autumn often symbolizes our later years, and in this case the symbolism helps us envision the speaker as an older person who has spent many years on the road of life.

The fact that this poem is set in autumn, indicated by the fact that the leaves are yellow, can also be seen as a symbol. The fork in the road is symbolic of major life choices. The road is a symbol for the journey of life. In ‘The Road Not Taken,’ many of the examples of metaphor are also symbols. Symbolism is figurative language that infuses literal things with symbolic meaning. Finally, in lines 13-15, the speaker realizes he will never be able to come back to the place where the two roads split: Oh, I kept the first for another day!Yet knowing how way leads on to way,I doubted if I should ever come back.We can read this as a metaphor for life-changing decisions that forever alter our path. In line 6, the speaker suddenly decides to take the path he has not been examining: Then took the other, as just as fair,This can be seen as a metaphor for making a spur-of-the moment decision in life. For example, in lines 4-5, the road becomes a metaphor for the future: And looked down one as far as I couldTo where it bent in the undergrowth The speaker looks down the path and can only see so far, in the same way that we can’t see the consequences of our choices in the future. The fork in the road is a metaphor for the choices we must make as we navigate our path.Within the larger extended metaphor are smaller ones. The road in the poem is a metaphor for life and the path we take through it. In fact, the metaphor applies throughout the entire poem, which makes it an extended metaphor if you’re being picky about it. Metaphor is probably this poem’s most obvious example of figurative language. In this lesson we will break down some of the figurative language in Robert Frost’s famous poem ‘ The Road Not Taken.’ MetaphorĪ metaphor is an implicitly made comparison between two seemingly unlike things. If it is Huck who gives the book its distinctive linguistic and cultural style, the River, says Eliot, 'ives the book its.* All Partners were chosen among 50+ writing services by our Customer Satisfaction Team

In so doing, he appears to use it as a metaphor for discussing the means by which Huck's story unfolds. In a discussion of the River as Twain's dominant literary symbol, Eliot speaks with the authority of personal experience of the river's behavior. Eliot's familiarity with the Mississippi River is important to his introduction because he sees it as one of the controlling structural symbols of the story. Eliot, who despite his association with British literature was in fact, like Twain, a native of Missouri (St. The importance of the Mississippi River as the controlling symbol of the pattern of ideas in Huckleberry Finn is argued forcefully by T.S.

Symbolism in the road not taken series#

Their journey down the river, which puts them in contact with a series of distinctive characters in ante-bellum America and which includes the recapture, escape (with the help of Tom Sawyer and Huck), recapture, and ultimate freeing of Jim from slavery, constitutes the main line of action in the story. He disappears from the area when he takes off down the river with the runaway slave Jim. When his drunken and abusive father shows up he follows him to escape the Widow, but then escapes from his father as well, killing a pig to make everybody think he is dead. Huckleberry Finn begins with Huck in conflict with the Widow Douglas, who has taken him in as a border to reform him. The plan of the research will be to set forth the general design of each book and then to discuss the interconnection between thematic intent and the power of the symbol in each. The purpose of this research is to examine how the river in Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and the road in Kerouac's On the Road function as symbolic foundations for the main characters' accretion of experience and the achievement of personal insight into certain social realities about American life.