Frost and Forché: A Comparative Analysis of Two Poems
This paper compares two poems — Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and Carolyn Forché's "The Colonel" — across four dimensions: theme, narrative perspective, figurative language, and poetic technique. The analysis explores how Frost's allegorical treatment of choice and discovery contrasts with Forché's unflinching documentary portrait of oppression and cruelty. It examines how both poets use first-person narration differently, how each deploys figurative language to generate dramatic tension, and how their contrasting formal choices — Frost's structured rhyme versus Forché's prose-poem style — produce distinctly different emotional effects in the reader.
- Introduction: Two Poems, Two Visions: Introduces Frost's theme of choice at a crossroads
- Theme and Allegory: Allegorical readings of both poems examined
- Narrative Perspective and Dramatic Situation: Contrasting roles of first-person speakers
- Figurative Language and Dramatic Tension: How each poet builds tension through imagery
- Poetic Technique and Form: Rhyme and structure versus prose-poem style
- Conclusion: Emotional impact compared across both poems
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper sustains a clear parallel structure throughout, consistently returning to both poems in each analytical section rather than treating them in isolation.
- It moves logically from theme and allegory, to narrative perspective, to figurative language, and finally to formal technique — each layer deepening the comparison.
- The writer grounds abstract claims (such as the ear "coming alive") in close reading of specific lines, grounding the analysis in textual evidence.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates sustained comparative close reading. Rather than summarizing each poem separately, the writer identifies shared analytical categories — allegory, perspective, figurative language, technique — and applies them to both texts simultaneously. This parallel method allows meaningful contrast to emerge organically, such as the observation that Frost's speaker is the main actor while Forché's speaker is a witness, a distinction that directly shapes each poem's emotional register.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens by introducing each poem's central theme individually, then moves into a paired discussion of allegorical potential, followed by an analysis of first-person perspective and dramatic situation. The figurative language section offers the paper's most detailed close reading, contrasting Frost's light irony with Forché's visceral imagery. The final section on poetic technique draws out formal differences — rhyme and stanza versus prose-poem — before delivering a brief evaluative conclusion on emotional effect.
Introduction: Two Poems, Two Visions
In "The Road Not Taken," Robert Frost works the theme of choice into the poem by depicting a traveler — a walker in the woods — who is stopped at a fork in the road: one way is the worn path, which indicates that its taker will get where he wants to go; the other way is less worn, greener, and will likely lead the traveler to some foreign destination or even cause him to become lost. Frost describes the two paths and their likely outcomes and then tells of the choice he made, comically adding that this choice has "made all the difference" — because, no doubt, it has extended his walk by a good few hours.
Theme and Allegory
Some read into Frost's poem an allegorical remark, surmising that Frost is advocating that we travelers of this earth take the "road not taken" and discover where the unworn path leads. They see the poem as a promotion of discovery, of voyage, of curiosity and freedom. Frost himself wrote the poem after being inspired by a friend who literally often took the "road not taken" on his walks and ended up getting lost. For Frost, the poem was a literal representation of a friend — but he fully embraced the allegorical reading that others applied to it as well, taking great delight in the power of poetry to raise in the reader's mind something wholly unexpected that even the writer did not quite fathom at the outset. Thus, the poem itself allows the reader to take it in a direction that was "not taken" in the mind of the writer when it was written — and of course, as Frost admits, such does make all the difference, because it informs the interpretation and thereby supplies the meaning.
"The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché is equally capable of producing a symbolic reading, as the last lines of the poem deliver a message that could be taken allegorically: "Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground" is an obvious reference to the oppressed peoples whose rights the Colonel does not care for — and the severed ears he collects and disdains at the same time indicate his complete disregard for the people under him: "I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves." The theme of oppression is woven into the poem by the Colonel's actions as he displays his arrogance and brutality for the poet who is his guest at the table — first by bringing out the severed ears, the evidence of his brutality, and then by throwing them on the floor, the evidence of his contempt.
Figurative Language and Dramatic Tension
Both writers use powerful figurative language in their poetry to convey a sense of dramatic tension. Even though Frost's poem is more light-hearted, this language is still employed so as to bring to the reader's mind the immensity of the decision that faces the walker: "I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence," Frost says — and the figurative force of these words suggests that the "road" is one that will change the course of his life forever and lead him to a destination he could not possibly imagine for himself, but from which he will, no doubt, be able to look back at this singular moment and realize that it was this decision that shaped all the rest of his life. The literal meaning of these words, however, is that this road less taken will simply lead him endlessly through the woods, cause him to sigh, and make him feel that he has been walking for "ages and ages."
In "The Colonel," the figurative language is more explicit: when the Colonel drops the ear in water, "It came alive there," says Forché, meaning that the ear stopped looking like a dried-up peach half and began to look more like an ear. But the figurative sense allows the reader to imagine the ear as a representative of the people being oppressed in the land overseen by the Colonel — and the water represents grace, the life-fluid that restores vitality to all living things. For the Colonel, water is a plaything that he controls, that he doles out carelessly, being the unholy dictator that he is.
Conclusion
Frost's poetic technique makes for a more enjoyable, traditionally "poetic" reading experience because of its use of rhyme and form, but Forché's poem is more visceral and effective in delivering emotions such as dread, sadness, and horror. Together, these two poems demonstrate the wide range of effects that the poetic form can achieve — from the quietly ironic to the deeply disturbing — depending on the choices a poet makes in subject matter, perspective, figurative language, and technique.
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