The diverging roads are pretty similar; the speaker chose the one less worn, as “having perhaps the better claim,” but three times we are told that the difference was negligible: “just as fair”; “Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same”; “equally.” It is important to notice that although a reason is given for the choice (“it was grassy and wanted wear”), we are led to doubt that there really was a clear basis for choosing. Certainly there is no moral basis.
Moreover, we may feel that had the speaker chosen the other path, the ending of the poem would have been the same; that is, he would remember the alternative path and would fantasize that he might someday return to take it, and would at the same time know that he would not return.
And so he would find that it too “has made all the difference.” The sigh imagined in the last stanza is not to be taken as an expression of regret for a life wasted, but as a semicomic picture of the speaker envisioning himself as an old man, wondering how things would have turned out if he had made a different choice—which is not at all to imply a rejection of the choice he did make.
A student can easily take the poem too seriously and to press it too hard for a moral, for example, that Frost says we should choose the “less traveled,” the unconventional, path. I have tried to suggest that the first two lines of the last stanza are playful, a reading that is supported by a letter in which Frost spoke of the poem as
“my rather private jest.” ( American Literature 50 [November 1978]: 478–79
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