Malaysia First

15/10/2023

05/07/2023

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost
•Short Analysis•
The Road Not Taken” is one of Robert Frost’s most familiar and most popular poems. It is made up of four stanzas of five lines each, and each line has between eight and ten syllables in a roughly iambic rhythm; the lines in each stanza rhyme in an abaab pattern. The popularity of the poem is largely a result of the simplicity of its symbolism: The speaker must choose between diverging paths in a wood, and he sees that choice as a metaphor for choosing between different directions in life. Nevertheless, for such a seemingly simple poem, it has been subject to very different interpretations of how the speaker feels about his situation and how the reader is to view the speaker. In 1961, Frost himself commented that “The Road Not Taken” is “a tricky poem, very tricky.”

Frost wrote the poem in the first person, which raises the question of whether the speaker is the poet himself or a persona, a character created for the purposes of the poem. According to the Lawrance Thompson biography, Robert Frost: The Years of Triumph (1971), Frost would often introduce the poem in public readings by saying that the speaker was based on his Welsh friend Edward Thomas. In Frost’s words, Thomas was “a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn’t go the other.”

In the first stanza of the poem, the speaker, while walking on an autumn day in a forest where the leaves have changed to yellow, must choose between two paths that head in different directions. He regrets that he cannot follow both roads, but since that is not possible, he pauses for a long while to consider his choice. In the first stanza and the beginning of the second, one road seems preferable; however, by the beginning of the third stanza he has decided that the paths are roughly equivalent. Later in the third stanza, he tries to cheer himself up by reassuring himself that he will return someday and walk the other road.

At the end of the third stanza and in the fourth, however, the speaker resumes his initial tone of sorrow and regret. He realizes that he probably will never return to walk the alternate path, and in the fourth stanza he considers how the choice he must make now will look to him in the future. The speaker believes that when he looks back years later, he will see that he had actually chosen the “less traveled” road. He also thinks that he will later realize what a large difference this choice has made in his life. Two important details suggest that the speaker believes that he will later regret having followed his chosen road: One is the idea that he will “sigh” as he tells this story, and the other is that the poem is entitled “The Road Not Taken”—implying that he will never stop thinking about the other path he might have followed.
Poetry Book: https://amzn.to/3ZJqZCj
Audiobook: https://amzn.to/3F2oNxV

21/12/2022

25/04/2022

Plot against the judiciary

Dennis Ignatius Published: Apr 25, 2022 1:35 PM



COMMENT | You can always tell when elections are around the corner by the wild rumours and slanderous allegations that start proliferating like maggots on a carcass.

It’s no different this time around with breaking news of a conspiracy between certain political leaders and the chief justice to target Umno politicians by expediting their court cases, as well as allegations that the judge who presided over Najib Abdul Razak’s SRC trial had “unexplained wealth”.

The thrust behind these allegations is the fake and fabricated notion that the courts have been weaponised against Umno and its leaders.

It is part of a wider campaign to convince the public that all those Umno leaders charged with, or convicted of, corruption are but innocent victims of a grand political conspiracy.

It is part of the same strategy behind the push for early elections in the hope of fore-stalling the ongoing trials of those same leaders.

A closer examination of the allegations will quickly confirm that they are frivolous, malicious and mischievous and cannot and should not be taken seriously at all.

Take, for example, the supposedly leaked minutes of a PAS meeting in which its leaders talked about conspiring with the judiciary to expedite the ongoing trials of Umno leaders.

Who in their right mind will believe that PAS can exert that kind of influence over the highest levels of our judiciary?

I have made no secret of my disdain for PAS – they are capable of doing many insidious things – but this is simply too far-fetched to be believed.

In any event, I will take the word of the courts – that “the chief justice has never communicated with, and/or been contacted by, any political leaders in relation to court cases involving Najib Abdul Razak and Ahmad Zahid Hamidi” – over anything that corrupt, dishonest and self-serving politicians have to say.

And as for the scandalous allegations against Justice Nazlan Mohd Ghazali – an upright and honest judge as ever there was – by a hired scoundrel dishing out slander from the safety of a foreign land, what I have to say cannot be printed.

Many will, no doubt, find it equally outrageous that Azam Baki, the MACC chief, would even lend credence to such egregious and malicious allegations by initiating investigations against Nazlan.

Unscrupulous politicians

You can bet that nothing will come out of it, but the damage to Nazlan’s reputation would have been done. And perhaps that is the point of the whole exercise.

Instead of investigating the judge, Azam should step down and allow a full, transparent and credible investigation into his own unexplained wealth arising out of his share ownership case a few months ago.

More than anything else, the allegations against the judiciary show just how far desperate men are willing to go to destroy one of the last credible institutions left in our nation.

When the judiciary stood in Dr Mahathir Mohamad’s way, he had some of the finest judges in the land unceremoniously removed from office on trumped-up charges. It has taken the judiciary a long time to recover from that body blow.

Now unscrupulous politicians are at it again – smearing our judges for their own nefarious ends.

It is a new low even for a country accustomed to dishonourable behaviour.

Surprisingly, the reaction of the Bar Council has been disappointing. Instead of a forthright defence of the integrity of the judiciary and Nazlan, they are quibbling with words.

Judges are constrained by their own code of ethics from defending themselves or speaking out publicly; it falls to the Bar Council, therefore, to speak out whenever judges are defamed and slandered.

Instead of merely issuing a tepid and pro forma statement, the Bar Council should immediately organise another march for justice to protest the slanderous allegations against the judiciary, as they did in September 2007.

Let’s be clear about what is really happening here. As the chief justice warned, the allegations about collusion with politicians are aimed at subverting the administration of justice and undermining public faith in it.

It is a targeted campaign by desperate and unscrupulous men working in the shadows to smear our judges in order to distract attention from their own crimes.

We have allowed so many of our national institutions to become compromised, to end up servile minions to corrupt and dishonourable politicians; we must not allow the same fate to befall our judiciary.

If our judiciary is compromised and tarnished by these unscrupulous politicians and their henchmen with their scurrilous allegations, Malaysia’s future itself will be further jeopardised.

Instead of investigating the judge or casting aspersions against a venerable institution, the authorities should go after all those who make those vile and malicious allegations.

DENNIS IGNATIUS is a former ambassador. He blogs here.

COMMENT | Plot against the judiciary

COMMENT | Plot against the judiciary
Go after all those who make vile and malicious allegations.

17/04/2022

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