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, “The Road Not Taken,” 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.