This poem was actually written satirically by Frost about going for walks with a friend who always complained afterward that they should have taken some other r

This poem was actually written satirically by Frost about going for walks with a friend who always complained afterward that they should have taken some other route and acted as if it would have been significantly better... when in reality it would have made no real difference: Frost's biographer Lawrance Thompson is cited as saying that the poem's narrator is "one who habitually wastes energy in regretting any choice made: belatedly but wistfully he sighs over the attractive alternative rejected." According to the Thompson biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (1971), in his introduction in readings to the public, Frost would say that the speaker was based on his friend Edward Thomas. In Frost’s words, Thomas was "a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other."