Essay comparing poetry by Heaney and Frost

How do the poets Heaney and Frost explore the elements of choice?

The two poems ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost and ‘An Advancement of Learning’ by Seamus Heaney both look at choice and show the differences between them. Both poets are trying to convey that in life, there are lots of decisions to make and our choices may influence a whole other sequence of events in out lives.

At the beginning of both of the poems, the men are faced with dilemmas about which way to walk. At the beginning of the Heaney poem, the man is faced with a choice about which route to take and one of the outcomes of this decision may result in him having to overcome his childhood fears. But at the beginning of the Frost poem, the man is faced with the choice of which road to take, both resulting in differences in his life.

If we look at the first stanza of the poems, at the beginning of Heaney, he says:

“ I took the embankment path, (As always deferring the bridge)”

Already we kn...