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.
That morning, both paths were equally empty, their leaf-cover undisturbed. The speaker has no one to follow or coerce him into choosing a path. The opening word ‘And’ is significant in that it suggests an ongoing internal personal debate. The speaker, though, is not achieving clarity as he thinks this through. 
 Many readers forget, or overlook, the fact that the “road less traveled” in this poem is roughly the same as the first; choosing either one makes no appreciable difference– except for the significance the speaker assigns the event years after the fact. 
 Choices that we think will make a huge difference in our lives, simply because we arbitrarily assign them some special weight, may turn out to be fairly inconsequential. 

The Road Not Taken