Gov. Malloy’s Well-Traveled Road

At a morning news conference, Gov. Dannel P. Malloy touted new figures showing the state’s unemployment rate has fallen to 7.8 percent.

But, he hastened to add, “I know we’re not out of the woods yet. We have miles to go before we sleep.”

It wasn’t the first time Malloy invoked the words of Robert Frost. In fact, the governor routinely weaves phrases of the New Hampshire poet’s two most popular poems into his comments and speeches.

At a press conference earlier in the week, he used the same phrase (from “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening”) when discussing his education overhaul effort.

The habit began his first weeks in office. In his inaugural address, Malloy spoke of taking a new approach to governing, “to compare how things have been done in the past, and to take a different path forward.”

He said he was “reminded of the renowned poet Robert Frost, a fellow New Englander, when he wrote in ‘The Road Not Taken:’ ‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference.”’

A month later, in his first budget address, Malloy returned to the Frost well, quoting the same poem to make largely the same point.

“I read Robert Frost on a regular basis,” Malloy said this morning.

If that’s true, perhaps the governor will deep a bit deeper in Frost oeuvre for his next news conference.