What did the poet wish to do in the future in "The Road Not Taken"?

This reference comes in the third stanza, with the lines:

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

The narrator had already chosen one of the two paths, “the one less traveled by.” Now he says at first that he could always come back and follow the other path on some other day in the future. But just as...

This reference comes in the third stanza, with the lines:

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

The narrator had already chosen one of the two paths, “the one less traveled by.” Now he says at first that he could always come back and follow the other path on some other day in the future. But just as quickly, he understands how life works. He knows that even though he can have the best of intentions to someday return to the point where the two routes divide, the reality is that he probably won’t come back. Another “future” scene appears in the final stanza, when the narrator says that from this moment on, he will be explaining to people how and why he made the decision he did. Will he then be happy about his past choice? This is the question we debate.