The Road Not Taken

"A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language." - W. H. Auden

I just finished watching the fifth season of Highlander on Netlfix and boy was I far from expecting this series to transport me the way that it did. The series has been going around since several years, which confirms I've been living under a rock. The plots, the characters, the costumes, the scenery, the deep storytelling built around feminism, war, abuse, slavery and injustice... This show completely swept me off my feet and now I have to dreadfully wait for the next seasons to come out.

Not only did the dreamy Scottish Highlands ring a bell to me for having visited a part of this area in 2020, but watching the characters unfold and illustrate the passage of English settlers to the Caribbean islands at one point particularly sparked my curiosity. It made me dive into my own ancestry and connect with, and search for my own Irish, French, Indian and African heritage.

Another fun fact that struck me upon reading about the author of the books on which the TV series is based is that she's an American of Mexican descent, and I'm just amazed how she was able to create a masterpiece set in WWII Britain and subsequently in 18th-century Scotland with such precision and detailing.

This period drama is of course, a historical fiction, but what has touched me the most is the main characters constant relocation, wether between cities, countries, continents or even different centuries, they are constantly fleeing adversity and searching for safety, purpose and belonging. Now, if you've read some of my previous articles, such as My Dilema With Choosing a Home Country and Home Is Where The Heart Is, you'll know this is practically the story of my own life. And I won't delve into the parallels now. But since I very much feel and identify as an "outlander" myself, I have to say I loved the way one of the last episodes of season 5 closes on the matter of choice. You see, when one chooses to relocate, one also chooses to leave something behind. And no one really knows in the end, wether the best choice was made because, well, it's impossible to live more than one path at the same time.

One of the characters quotes the last stanza of a lovely English poem written by Robert Frost:

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.

This well-known poem written in 1915 contains multiple meanings. The speaker in the poem, faced with a choice between two roads, takes the road "less traveled," a decision which he or she supposes "made all the difference." However, Frost creates enough subtle ambiguity in the poem that it's unclear whether the speaker's judgment should be taken at face value, and therefore, whether the poem is about the speaker making a simple but impactful choice, or about how the speaker interprets a choice whose impact is unclear.

Sarah the Digital GypSea

Dominican Republic, January 2023