The Road not Taken?

Question

No interpretations here. I just need a similar-themed poem to "The Road not taken", and yes, only same theme

Answer 1

Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep

Answer 2

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth; 5

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same, 10

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back. 15

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 traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. 20

Answer 3

I always thought that William Henley's "Invictus" made a nice companion to "The Road not Taken."
It's about self-determination and individualism.

OUT of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

Answer 4

Does it have to be a poem because there is a short story by Jorger Luis Borges that deals with the same theme. It's called "The Garden of Forking Paths," and it's very good.

Answer 5

Mutability

WE are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;
How restlessly they speed, and gleam, and quiver,
Streaking the darkness rediantly! -- yet soon
Night closes round, and they are lost forever:

Or like forgotten lyres, whose dissonant strings
Give various response to each varying blast,
To whose frail frame no second motion brings
One mood or modulation like the last.

We rest. -- A dream has power to poison sleep;
We rise. -- One wandering thought pollutes the day;
We feel, conceive or reason, laugh or weep;
Embrace fond woe, or cast our cares away:

It is the same! -- For, be it joy or sorrow,
The path of its departure still is free:
Man's yesterday may ne'er be like his morrow;
Nought may endure but Mutability.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Answer 6

Similar themed archetypal dilemma poetry can be found in
"Entire Dilemma" By Michael Burkard

Review:

In his sixth collection of poetry, Entire Dilemma, Michael Burkard considers not only the life he has lived but also the many lives he has not lived, a range of might-have-beens, of alternative lives in parallel universes.

Even as he acknowledges the limits of ordinary and actual experience, Burkard delivers what human communities have always asked of their poets and poems: wonder and song. "[G]iven one's powerlessness," Burkard ponders whether "it isn't so far/fetched" to wish to "possess/a slightly other-than human//magic."

Burkard's poems work, at a subconscious level, to awaken us from the narcolepsy of everyday life to reach for the dream beyond. From a dreamer's vantage point, they envision life, death, love, recovery, earth, and the cosmos. As "contemplations of Being," these poems satisfy the poet's central responsibility, as phrased by Milosz.

Burkard's work is remarkable for its ability to ponder and think on the page without the usual crutches of logic. In "A Point," Burkard admits the necessity of having a point of reference but illustrates how fluid that point can be:

"All you need is a point.
It seems that it has no dimension.
but that point can become God.
Any God."

The self, for Burkard, is one such reference point. Like the moon that illuminates the book's central paradox of human connection and alienation, Burkard's "I" is a symbolic self whose particular experience will not be mined for pain nor mired in autobiography. Instead, Burkard's self functions as a kind of radar eye that locates human experience in its particular incidence.

That Burkard is able to occupy what has been described as "negative capability" is both challenge and consolation to any reader who feels and thinks and dreams and, in the final analysis, who arrives at the considered position with which the volume opens: "Fred,/I don't know what to do."

In plain language that resists both arcane and slang diction, Burkard is brilliantly original in terms of syntax, image, and flexibility of line. Entire Dilemma addresses everyday life: the people we know and those we don't; working for a living; death; alcoholism and sobriety; isolation and community. After the smoke and dust clear from the "canon wars," and when the dramatic, but essentially specious oppositions of poetry "schools" have run their course, Michael Burkard will be seen as a central and essential poet of our time.

EXAMPLE
A dark whimsy complicates Entire Dilemma. We must read Michael Burkard’s poems in the same way they were written—intuitively, sensing that they have been translated from a language we are not entirely fluent in, though we recognize the vocabulary:


Teachers are mean.
Their tenderness falls asleep
halfway through the class.
You took out a deck of cards
in order to survive.
You were punished.
Sent home.
Abolished.

For more on this title poem, see this link:
http://www.sarabandebooks.org/sarabande/Authors/Micheal%20Burkard/998329565562/readers_guide/review.html
**

Good luck

Answer 7

Well, I searched and searched and couldn't find anything with the identical theme.

I guess that's why the poem is so famous and so often quoted. And so apropos to life's quandaries and regrets.

He is/was a genius.