The opening stanza introduces the poem's two speakers, structure, and allegorical subject.
The speakers are never named; this guide will call them the "questioner" and the "answerer." They speak at regular intervals, with each question and answer occupying a single end-stopped line. The questions are typically a few syllables longer than the answers, so the answers sound blunt and direct, perhaps even ominous, by comparison.
On the surface, the speakers are discussing a "road" and a "journey." But their language is so generalized (for example, they don't mention any specific place names) that it starts to sound figurative. In fact, it sets up an allegory or extended metaphor for the journey of life:
- The "road" in line 1 is the road of life, which takes "the whole long day" to travel. That is, it spans the whole distance from birth to death (or youth to old age), the metaphorical "morn[ing]" and "night" of life.
- And it "wind[s] up-hill all the way": in other words, life is always an uphill struggle, with many twists and turns en route. There's never a straightforward, downhill stretch—a time in one's life when one can just relax and coast.
At the end of the stanza, the answerer calls the questioner "my friend." This is the poem's only hint at the relationship between the two—and of course, "my friend" doesn't have to be read literally. The answerer is simply an individual with far more knowledge of life and death than the questioner. Perhaps this is a god talking to a mortal, a ghost to a living person, or an elder sage to someone starting out on life's journey. Perhaps they mean "my friend" literally, perhaps with a touch of condescension or irony. (In general, it's possible to interpret the poem as very comforting, totally comfortless, or anywhere in between—much depends on the reader's own beliefs and attitudes.)
This opening stanza also establishes the poem's basic form: quatrains (four-line stanzas) that rhyme on alternating lines (ABAB) and follow a loose accentual meter. Specifically, the stanzas tend to alternate between four or five and three stressed syllables per line, somewhat like a traditional ballad. But this rhythm is rough and variable. Often the lines fall into an iambic (da-DUM) pattern, but not always; sometimes a line that's supposed to have three stressed syllables has at least four. The poem combines formal roughness with formal predictability, in a way that seems to fit the image of a hard road to a predictable destination.