The Road Not Taken And Nikki Giovanni's Choices

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Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” and Nikki Giovanni’s poem “Choices” are indeed both about choices, but Giovanni’s poem deals more with what you should do when you don’t get your first choice whereas Frost’s poem focuses on the impact of taking one choice over another. “The Road Not Taken” discusses how our choices affect us and why we make them, while “Choices” deals with feeling satisfied by our choices. Although different, I believe that these poems are focusing on the same main point, but from different angles and perspectives. Although famous, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” in my opinion, is infamous for being one of the most misunderstood poems of all time. Most think that “The Road Not Taken” is about a traveler in the…show more content…
Based off other writing, Nikki Giovanni is an empowering woman writer and tends to write a lot about her own experiences. Robert Frost has a lot of different types of poems but I do believe that “The Road Not Taken” is from his perspective because the poem is about making a choice and wondering if you regret it or not, which is often thought about in first person. In “Choices” Giovanni’s tone is optimism but there could also be some frustration. Nikki Giovanni is an African American writer and this poem could be about how you don’t always have the choices you think that you deserve and the ones you really want. She could be referencing that as a black woman she didn’t always get her first pick in a, “white man’s world.” Frost’s tone in “The Road Not Taken” could possibly be regret. In contrast to “Choices,” where the narrator is taking what she can get, this narrator had two choices and he could have picked either of them and now looking back, is the narrator happy with the road he chose? Based on the fact that he will recount this event with a sigh and tell people that he took the one less traveled to make him sound better, he probably isn’t that pleased with it. This could possibly be alluding to the fact the narrator isn’t always happy with his choices in…show more content…
If you asked the narrator of “The Road Not Taken,” he might say that it has to do with what you do when you’re faced with a fork in the road. If both choices are equally difficult then it says a lot about your character depending on which choice you make. The narrator’s character will change when he is later asked to recount the event, as he is going to lie about his choices. If the narrator of “Choices” was asked the same question I think she would probably say that how we deal with not getting what we want, but making the best of it, shapes us into whom we are. Giovanni wrote, “If I can’t have what I want…then my job is to want what I’ve got and be satisfied that at least there is something more to want” (Giovanni lns 9-15). I really enjoyed these lines. Giovanni’s narrator is saying that although she can’t have everything she wants, she’s going to make a conscious effort to be happy with what she does have. She is also saying that she finds solace in knowing that there is more out there for her and she could have it one day, but for the time being she’ll have what she can. I think that it is easy to get discouraged if you can’t get your first choice all the time. After a while you might start to have doubts and give up. That can cause our identity to

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