There will doubtless be countless gripes about Budget 2015; and its grasp of poetry won’t rank among the more significant.
But Michael Noonan’s references to 'The Road Not Taken' struck a chord with the public – Robert Frost even trending on Twitter this afternoon.
Which makes it all the more irritating that the minister misinterpreted the key message of the poem.
Lochlann Mac a' Bháird casts a critical eye over the minister's Budget speech
After reeling off lists of figures and pledging not to touch alcohol in the Budget, likely to be one of the more popular measures, Noonan opted to finish his speech with a literary flourish.
He urged colleagues to recall Frost’s most famous poem, and its opening line: “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood”.
So far so good.
He said past governments had frequently gone down “a road whose signposts are tax and spend and where one’s journey is through boom to bust”, a path we’re sadly all familiar with.
Alas, he then veered off track, asking if the Government should, “like Frost, take the road ‘less travelled by’?”
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could go down a different track, and avoid the mistakes of the past, leading to a better future?
Unfortunately for the minister, Frost goes on to suggest that both roads are essentially the same: “…the passing there/Had worn them really about the same/And both that morning equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black.”
Frost concludes the poem with a prediction that some time in the distant future he will retell the story, boasting that his bold decision “made all the difference”.
Noonan’s decisions may well lead to a better future, but if we’re to follow his chosen allegory, he had no good reason for choosing this path over the alternative.
Probably not the message he wanted to convey.
Given that we have a Minister for the Gaeltacht who doesn’t really speak much Irish, it might be asking too much to expect the Minister for Finance to be an expert on poetry.
But one hopes the mandarins and speech writers put more research into his policies than his poems.
Robert Frost, 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 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
