Mountain Interval

Mountain Interval (1916), Robert Frost's third published poetry collection describes a certain sense of the future as circumscribed by the choices of the past one has made. The collection's first and most famous poem, &quote;The Road Not Taken,&quote; in which Frost deploys the forked path in the woods as a metaphor for the course of life itself. While the situation evokes the first canto of the Divine Comedy, Frost avoids Dante's overtly allegorical manner by creating a speaker whose spare vocabulary and vernacular syntax lends the poem a more parable-like narrative force.