What is the theme and topic of the poem, "The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost?

One way to tackle this poem is to think about your own
life and consider a choice that you made that marked a real turning point in your life
and the way it was going. It might have been something simple or something big, for
example if could have been trying out for a sports team, standing up for a friend or a
job choice. However, now, because of that choice, your life has gone in a completely
different direction as a result. Go back to the moment when you made the choice, and
imagine that you made a different one instead. How would your life be different now?
What would you be doing?

This poem is symbolically about
these kind of decisions, as the persona of the poem takes a walk in a wood and is
confronted with this kind of choice:

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Two roads diverged in a yellow
wood,

And sorry I could not travel
both...

This poet has to make
such a decision, chooses one, with the intention of going back and taking the other,
however he admits that:

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Yet knowing how way leads on to
way,

I doubted if I should ever come
back.

This choice therefore
captures the theme of the poem which could be said to be contradictions. A particular
choice you once made might have improved your life in some ways but made it worse in
others. Was it a good choice or a bad one? It was both - and it was neither. Yet the
last stanza makes it clear that this relatively simple choice is one that the persona
knows will haunt him in his later life as he thinks what his life would be like if he
had taken the other path:

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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.

In this poem
therefore the roads and the choice that the poet needs to make stand as symbols for the
choices we need to make in life. The last line of the poem recognises how even the
simplest of choices can have a massive impact on the course of our lives, and the last
stanza makes it clear the way that these life choices can haunt us as we consider what
would have happened if we had taken another path.