The choices we make can be enough to sink or strengthen us. They help shape our futures, mapping out new terrain or returning us to earlier situations or horizons. Whilst the world itself might delineate our projections of the future we hoped to have, or whether luck, misfortune, or the actions of others have something to say about it, choice is a variable of huge importance. For American poet Robert Frost, agency and choice proved inspirational enough for him to write his 1915 poem, ‘The Road Not Taken’, about such topics:

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;

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,

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.

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.

Robert Frost ©️ Eric Shaal

Despite many literal readings of this poem, which summarise that its narrative is fixed on the reflections of a speaker reminiscing about the divergence of two paths and his own choice to take one of those routes, it is a far more complex text. Critics such as Catherine Robson and David Orr have lauded the poem as an ironic take on such a binary concept, whilst others have unearthed a more open analysis of Frost’s closing line, “I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference.” But at its core, Frost’s poem is a literary curio, tasked with inviting the reader to use its narrative as a mirror to reflect upon our histories and present. Because of its accessibility and universality, the poem's rubric is disarming; it doesn’t allow for specificity. Instead, like most curios, it involves a process of disentanglement, whereupon the reader is forced to make sense of it by making sense of themselves and their own choices.

This process of disentanglement and returning to the causality and consequences of our choices is explored in the same manner throughout Barry Jenkins’ 2016 film Moonlight. Brought to life as an adaptation of Tarell Alvin McCraney’s unpublished play, Jenkins’ film is a soulful assessment of the power of choices and decisions in shaping one’s life. I remember the experience, ten years ago, seeing Jenkins’ film on the big screen with such extreme clarity. I remember the profundity of the film’s visual messaging, where the colouration of the cinematography, the three-act structure, and the mesmerising performances merged in glorious union. As much as the film is a cinematic portrayal of the path that one person’s life takes, it is also a film that investigates the influence that decisions have upon that path. For the film’s protagonist, Chiron (known as ‘Little’, ‘Chiron’, and ‘Black’ across the film), these decisions are pivotal in distilling the complexities of his life, as he navigates his growth and adolescence against the harshness of an American life surrounded by poverty, drug addiction, abuse, and social taboo.

In the finer aspects of Jenkins’ film, the messaging that can be excavated from Frost’s poem finds itself brought to life in some unique and challenging ways. For Chiron, the difficulty of his existence erodes his ability to make decisions that benefit him. Without support networks or the familial guidance that most people might benefit from, Chiron’s decisions are mostly impulsive and indulged by instinct as a means of surviving the harshness of his environment. Our first encounter with Chiron is as a young boy evading his bullies by hiding in an abandoned crack house. Victimised due to his small frame and quiet nature, Chiron’s choice to avoid his bullies by hiding is a choice of surprising value. Luckily, Chiron is found and helped by a local drug dealer, Juan, a man who voluntarily begins acting as a surrogate father figure. The fruits of Chiron’s actions are at first supportive because this choice leads to the introduction of a more nuclear family unit, including Juan and his partner, Teresa. By showcasing the happenstance of such an event, Jenkins quantifies the value of small, seemingly minor actions that can elevate one’s fortunes. For Chiron, the warmth of Juan and Teresa negates the corrosive influence of his mother, Paula, whose crack addiction is prioritised over her role as a mother. However, in the same first act, the significance of choice and agency is dissembled by different means.

Near the close of the act, Juan is shown in his day-to-day operations as a drug dealer, managing fellow street dealers as they covertly exchange substances for money. Here, Jenkins does an excellent job of exhibiting the reality of crack addiction and its obsessive nature without judgement. This scene observes the reality of addiction as a mental health crisis that has exploded beyond proportion, whilst navigating the audience through the visceral, bodily consequences experienced due to past choices. At this very moment, Chiron’s mother is shown arguing with Juan about Chiron’s safety and well-being. For Juan, he finds Paula’s ‘choice’ to take drugs to be a selfish act of negligence. However, as Paula herself rightly responds, it is in fact Juan’s choice to sell her the drugs. Jenkins’ narrative assesses choice beyond its benefits and instead probes it as a crossroads between morality and agency. Juan’s actions not only impact his own life, but also the lives of others, including Chiron. Whilst some might argue that if Juan decided to abandon his role and make the choice of another career, Paula’s habits would still be fulfilled by another, the moral complexity remains. When Chiron, at the scene's end, finds out that Juan has been dealing with Paula, Juan’s defeated glance and self-disappointment highlight his own regrets at having made these choices. In Juan’s eyes, Chiron exists as his redemption, a chance to fulfil the life of another and support him in making the right choices, unlike himself. Yet this intention, however great, does not negate the impact of his drug dealing. The contradictory crossover of these two choices complicates the nature of agency itself, as something beyond the clarity of one choice being a linear process.

In Robert Frost’s poem, the simplicity of making choices isn’t accepted either. The poem’s metaphor of an unknown speaker reflecting on their previous choice to take one physical route and not another helps paralyse the complexity of these ideas into something that translates with further ease. Despite this, Frost’s poem resists the temptation of straightforward moralising. The speaker’s reflection on the choice between two paths functions less as a prescription for life, rather as a meditation on the very nature of decision-making. The roads themselves are “just as fair” yet the speaker imagines, perhaps deceptively, that one is less travelled. This uncertainty highlights a tension between perception and reality; the significance we attribute to our choices is often constructed in hindsight, Frost’s final lines carry a dual resonance. On one level, they suggest pride and affirmation, a sense that agency and courage shape destiny. On another, they hint at irony, as the poem earlier admits the paths were essentially equal, thereby questioning whether the “difference” is external or a subjective interpretation imposed by the speaker. In this way, the poem embodies the ambiguity of choice itself; our decisions are consequential, yet their true impact is never entirely knowable at the moment they are made.

A close reading of Frost’s language further complicates this ambiguity. The poem’s diction is deceptively simple, but it quietly exposes the instability that underpins the speaker’s sense of agency. Words such as “perhaps”, “as just as fair”, and the admission that the two paths “really [were] about the same” destabilise the confident declaration that appears at the poem’s conclusion. Frost repeatedly qualifies the speaker’s observations, implying that the distinction between the roads is less objective than imagined. Even the act of looking down one path “as far as I could / To where it bent in the undergrowth” evokes a limit to vision and knowledge. The bend in the road then symbolises a horizon of uncertainty: the future cannot be fully seen, only speculated. As a result, the speaker’s eventual claim that his choice “has made all the difference” begins to sound less like a factual statement and more like a narrative constructed after the fact; a story told to give shape and meaning to the unknowable consequences of a single moment.

This subtle tension between certainty and speculation finds a visual and emotional echo in Moonlight. Much like Frost’s bending path, the film repeatedly places Chiron at points where the future disappears from view, forcing him to act without clarity about what lies ahead. Jenkins’ cinematography, particularly his recurring use of blue hues and soft illumination, mirrors the poem’s sense of partial visibility. Moonlight itself becomes an apt metaphor; it reveals enough to guide movement, yet never with the clarity of daylight. The film’s closing act, when the adult Chiron reconnects with Kevin, captures this uncertainty with particular resonance. After years of distance, violence, and self-reinvention, Chiron arrives at Kevin’s diner carrying the weight of choices that have hardened him into the persona of “Black”. Yet their conversation quietly dismantles this constructed identity. Kevin admits that Chiron was the only man who ever touched him, and in doing so, this opens a space for reflection that Chiron has long avoided.

Alex Hibbert in “Moonlight.” ©️David Bornfriend/A24

Both texts ultimately return to the central idea introduced at the outset: that the choices we make possess the power to shape our futures, yet their true meaning often emerges only through reflection. In Robert Frost’s ‘The Road Not Taken’, the speaker revisits a seemingly simple decision between two paths and transforms it, over time, into a defining moment of personal narrative. The poem therefore suggests that while agency is vital; the significance we attach to our choices is often constructed retrospectively, shaped by memory as much as reality.

A similar process unfolds in Moonlight. Chiron’s life is guided by decisions made under pressure, instinct, and survival, yet this emotional burden becomes clearest only later, particularly during his reunion with Kevin. In this moment of reflection, the hardened identity he has constructed begins to soften, allowing him to confront the path his life has taken. Like Frost’s speaker looking back across time, Chiron exists in a space where past choices are reconsidered and reinterpreted. Therefore, both works emphasise that while our decisions map out the terrain of our lives, it is reflection, often occurring much later, that allows us to understand the difference they have truly made.