Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
Read the full poem here.
Theme
Our theme this month couldn’t be more pressing: leadership. There have been a lot of questions – in the US, the UK, and all over the world, really – about what makes a good leader. Is it wisdom? Experience? Tenacity? Risk-taking? Charisma? Carefulness? Naturally, there is no one answer, and good leadership – whether individual or as a group effort – is achieved by responding flexibly, creatively, and thoughtfully to the situation at hand: by making tough decisions, and working with the consequences.
Who?
Well, this month I’ve chosen a stone-cold classic. ‘The Road Not Taken’ by Robert Frost (1874 – 1963) is a poem that most, at some point, will come across. It’s up there with ‘I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings’ by Maya Angelou as one of the most famous poems in our current culture. This means that Frost himself knew a lot about leadership: he was, during his life, at the very forefront of the literary scene in the US, the most public of poets, and won four Pulitzer Prizes, a Congressional Gold Medal, and was Poet Laureate of Vermont. He was, in other words, one of those rare poets that captures the wider public’s imagination, and as such had a great weight of responsibility. We can see in the poem above how much making the right decision meant to him.
What?
Read the poem above a couple of times to get a handle on some of the themes. This shouldn’t be too difficult: Frost was known for his simple and relatable diction (i.e. his way of speaking), and for writing poems with a clear message —almost like a fable. This is one way Frost forged a path for himself at the top of the poetry world, and it inspired a lot of poetry that came after him. There are very few tricks in ‘The Road Not Taken’, and the poem just describes the moment of dilemma at a crossroads. But it thinks very carefully about the consequences of either choice, and how, overall, whatever choice we make is less important than how we continue with that choice: ‘how way leads on to way’.
We might notice how the poem performs a moment’s indecision at the ends of its lines, in what are called line-breaks (this is what makes a poem different to prose and gives it a distinctive shape). We might waver for a second between the lines:
And Sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveller, long I stood
And looked down one as far I could
We don’t quite know where we’re going at the end of the line, but, in the end, we’re carried forward by the ‘Ands’ that start each line. It perfectly performs Frost’s ideas about decision making: once we’re over the line, the important thing is to keep going.
The Broader Context
Effective leadership is under great scrutiny at the moment, and we’re poised at various crossroads: but which road will we take? That remains to be seen, but Frost helps us to think about how we go about making clear and firm decisions, and then how we, as leaders, live with those decisions. He eschews overly complex lyricism in favour of a decisive message, that whatever way we choose, how we choose matters: it is that ‘that has made all the difference.’
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