When the narrator comes to a fork in the road, the first thing he does is try to see down one of them as far as he can (line 4) up until it bends away into the forest (5). Next, he inspects the other road (6), noting both that it is more grassy than the first (8) as well as that they seem to have been traveled about the same number of times (9-10). He sees that both are covered in leaves that look equally fresh (11-12), and he makes the decision to take the second, grassier path (12). However, even though he thought it might be interesting to come back and take the first path some day (13), he knows that it is unlikely that he'll ever be able to come back and try it because of the nature of choices: how one leads to the next and so on (14-15).
Finally, in the last stanza, he anticipates telling the story of his choice once he's become an old man (16-17). After the colon at the end of line 17 is the story he's going to tell: that he once came to a fork in the road (18), he took the road less traveled (19), and that has made a big difference in the way his life turned out (20). What's the problem? That story will be a lie. He's already said that one road was "just as fair" as the other (6), that they had been trodden the same number of times (9-10), and both that morning "equally lay" in fresh leaves (11-12). He plans to make it sound as though he made a truly unique choice, a choice that not many people make, but this will be untrue because he's told us that the roads were walked on by equal number of feet. Thus, his descriptions of the roads tells us that there really aren't unique choices; we can only choose the roads that have been taken before us.
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