What is the allegorical significance of the poem "The Road Not Taken"?

Have you ever made a decision, which may have been major
or minor, about your life and the way that you want it to go, that has led you into a
very different direction? It might have been choosing one college over another, or one
Major over another Major, or choosing to try out for a sports team. I am sure you have.
All of us in life have to make decisions that have a massive impact on the way that our
future lives look, and if you think about it, who we are today and what we are doing and
the kind of lives we lead are the result of lots of these separate decisions that we
have made through our life.

However, have you ever found
yourself wandering what your life would have been like if you had made a different
decision on one of those junctures in life's journey? Where would you be now if you had
gone to a different college, for example? It is this kind of wondering that concerns
this excellent poem by Robert Frost.

Note how the poem
presents us with a man walking in the woods and having to choose between two
roads:

Two
roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not
travel both

And be one traveller, long I
stood

And looked down one as far as I
could

To where it bent in the
undergrowth;

Although the
speaker would like to be able to travel both roads, he is forced to make a decision and
go down one. Both roads look "just as fair" as the other, yet he consoles himself with
the idea that he will be able to go back and try the other
road:

Oh, I
kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads
on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come
back.

Realistically, the way
that life goes on to other choices and other decisions that have to be made, the speaker
recognises that he will never be able to take the first path and see where it leads him.
This realisation leads to the final stanza of the
poem:

I shall
be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages
hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and
I--

I took the one less travelled
by,

And that has made all the
difference.

Thus the poems
allegorical significance is clear. The "road" is the path of life that we are all on,
and the forks in this road are the decisions that we have to make. However, the last
stanza of this poem shows how the speaker is haunted by his choice and what could have
happened if he had taken the other path, and where he would be now in his life. This is
a very profound and haunting poem that makes us think too about our own decisions and
how we could be living a very different life if we had taken "the road less
travelled."