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Example research essay topic: Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken - 1,570 words

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ROBERT FROSTS THE ROAD NOT TAKEN Few people have learned to fully trust his own sense of how things means to him, and accept it as his guide. At several points in ones life, one abandons paths that were important to ones journey in order to get the safety and love he knew no other way to get. People must respond to information by making choices and decisions. Yet time after time, they freeze, and nothing is more destructive to the health of the individual. Research indicates a strong connection between indecision and illness. The theory behind this is that all the energy created by the body to handle the decision isnt released.

Instead, the energy implodes and cause disease. Thus, we must learn to make decisions. But we must also learn to make them quickly and without regret. When one person fails to make a decision quickly, the window of opportunity closes. Poetry, according to Coleridge, is the best words in their best order. Although this remark hardly satisfies the requirements of formal definition, it does assert an important fact: the order of the words in a poem is as material as the words themselves.

A good poet labors harder than any other kind of writer to say exactly what he means, because he wishes to expose his thoughts rather than hide them. His passion for excuses is like the mathematicians. But unlike the mathematician, who thinks in abstractions, the poet not only thinks concretely but presents his thoughts concretely. Robert Frost who pens this poem and has selected, arranged and rearranged the words until he arrives at the one way in which he wants to say his thoughts. Indeed, Frost allows and takes much greater freedom with language than other writers and speakers. Poetic license, the right of a poet to deviate from standard practices in order to achieve a certain effect, allows him to ignore rules that prose writers customarily follow.

This poem employs this poetic license as we shall see that some of the words have been put together in such a way that only the author is capable of making. The poet leaves his referents implied rather than stated. He takes liberties with his syntax and the order of his words in the sentences. Some people dont want to face options. The dizzying spin of the cycle throws them in a loop. They cant handle the information overload, the many choices, the unending decisions, and the stress of change.

By eliminating or censoring information, you stop the cycle in its rotation and may avoid choices, decisions or change. Delaying a decision has other negative consequences. Delay a decision by as little as one day and the decision radically changes. When you delay, you never have the same decision to make again because in an information-intensive culture, the facts are different the next day or the next week. Frost talks about the two roads right at the start of the first paragraph.

He apologizes that he cannot travel the two roads at the same time. Indeed we sense the individual is standing at the fork of the road musing on which road to take. Actually, that road held a kind of mystery as he surveyed the path And looked down one as far as I could, to where it bent in the undergrowth. The end of that road bent, and where there is bending from the persons point of view, there is a hidden portion somewhere, some part where the readers and the individual in the poem is not privy to.

The second paragraph gives the readers a glimpse of the kind of road that the person takes grassy and wanted wear. In a way, it is a kind of self-determination on the part of the author. But it is more of a rebellion. It means taking explicit responsibility for his own growth process.

How does one know that what he chooses is a growing one? If it leads him to make better use of his potential, then that is what one calls growth. There are two divergent roads in Frosts poem. Deciding is not easy. Yet, one does not have to waste his energy trying to make a hard way easy.

If he chooses his own path, he will change in ways that fit who he is; not in ways that are alien to him. That is why he says in the last paragraph that I shall be telling this with a sigh, I took the one less traveled by. When one is facing a decision, then he is sounding-out the depth of his own strengths and the richness of his resources. One is responsible for one's own life. Passivity provides no protection: One must accept responsibility for a decision before one can make any decision. Before everyone becomes one-second decision-makers, there is a need to distinguish between fast and impulsive decision-making.

Fast decision-making is not synonymous with snap, fact-deficient decisions. There is also no self-blame here. He travels the road and he finds that there is no regret in that. He does not blame himself nor the circumstances or people in his past that makes him as he is. If he accepts the responsibility for his own troubles, he can no longer use his indecision at one point as an excuse to avoid doing anything to change. Taking responsibility for all urges, impulses, feelings and actions means that he can no longer use I did it unconsciously as an excuse.

Frost depicts the consciousness of his choice in every word he takes. As one reads the last paragraph, one is moved to know subliminally that the person is glad that he has chosen the path that he did in the very beginning. He may have felt strange trekking that path, or stiff and stilted, as he tried it out. The new way may be very natural, but still feel unusual, just as a new method of doing something feels odd at first. But as he learns the new way better, it will come to seem more usual. In many ways, the individual in this poem will be a very different person than he was ten years ago.

He is glad that he is not imprisoned in peoples conceptions of himself. Frost depicts this when he states that he will say this with a sigh, not a sigh of regret but more of gladness at having made the right decision. His present includes his remembering of that day when he took that road. These are his roots. He draws on them for lessons they hold and the good feelings he can find there. His thoughts about what things lie ahead of him and his thoughts about tomorrow give him a sense of direction and expectation.

Learning to be there with himself and his experiences without going anywhere can be a direction. The present moment is the focal point of past and future. It is the expression of all that has happened and the place where he must apply his energy to affect what will be. Many of his memories of yesterday and thoughts about tomorrow have some message and meaning for his life in the moment. Frosts poem, no matter how simple it may seem connotes a certain kind of ambiguity, too.

For example, one wonders at what point in life did the fork on the road occur? Where do both roads lead? A poem, as all else are wont to be, communicates an experience that cannot be communicated by ordinary literal language. It does so by means of figurative language, which gives depth and richness to the experience. Some poems are so rich that they convey two or even more experiences simultaneously. Frost talks about keeping the first for another day.

Thus, one wonders why he had to do that? What would have happened had he taken the second road? What was the difference that happened to him when he took the other road? Could Frost actually have taken that walk in the woods? Did it actually suggest more than just a mere walk? Despite all these ambiguities, there is a total unity of images in the end as he sighs and thinks that the decision he made in the past made all the difference to what he became in the end.

Even if he doubted if he should ever come back, his decision had been final at that point and there was no turning back. Decision-making is a cognitive process of selecting a course of action from among multiple alternatives (Wikipedia). It involves the cognitive process. It is based on observable actions and assumes that people make a commitment to effect the action. Just as Frost writes of the person who makes a decision between two paths, men today make everyday decisions and respond to information fast. It may be decades far from Frost time, but today people may avoid change rather than embrace it.

They are terrified by all the new information, choices and decisions rolling toward them. The paths lay out before them are not only forked but diversified. They view the stress that accompanies change as unhealthy. Yet people who develop their decision-making skills at a forked road have the opportunity to be more successful faster than ever before. WORKS CITED Robert Frost.

The Presidential Poet. Accessed 17 October 2005 at: web Decision-making Wikipedia. Accessed 17 October 2005 at: web


Free research essays on topics related to: decision making, cognitive process, robert frost, choices and decisions, frosts poem

Research essay sample on Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken

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