Dear Prince Albert: Why in the world did you choose "The road not taken " for your wedding speech - Flower of Change

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04. Juli '11

Dear Prince Albert: Why in the world did you choose "The road not taken " for your wedding speech

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Dear Prince Albert !

I read the news today, oh boy ...

"A road less travelled "

Taking the "road less travelled" enabled Prince Albert of Monaco to meet his wife Charlene Wittstock, the sovereign ruler said in his wedding speech.

Speaking at the wedding dinner, Prince Albert of Monaco made reference to Robert Frost's famous poem, The Road Not Taken. He said: "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

So far so good ? ...

Why in the world did you, Prince Albert choose the most missunderstood poem of all times for your wedding speech...

The road not taken

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.

Several generations of careless readers have turned it into a piece of Hallmark happy-graduation-son, seize-the-future puffery. Cursed with a perfect marriage of form and content, arresting phrase wrought from simple words, and resonant metaphor, it seems as if “The Road Not Taken” gets memorized without really being read. For this it has died the cliché’s un-death of trivial immortality.

The poems title is not “The Road Less Traveled” but “The Road Not Taken.” Even as he makes a choice (a choice he is forced to make if does not want to stand forever in the woods, one for which he has no real guide or definitive basis for decision-making), the speaker knows that he will second-guess himself somewhere down the line—or at the very least he will wonder at what is irrevocably lost: the impossible, unknowable Other Path. But the nature of the decision is such that there is no Right Path—just the chosen path and the other path. What are sighed for ages and ages hence are not so much the wrong decisions as the moments of decision themselves—moments that, one a top the other, mark the passing of a life. This is the more primal strain of remorse.

Wishing you all the best !

Warmly Annette Maria