Posted by Helen on September 12, 1997 at 06:51:50:
In reply to Some poems #2 posted by Helen on September 12, 1997 at 06:50:32
I read this poem first when I was very young, and it still sends goose-pimples down my spine when I read it (I have them as I write...)
The Way through the Woods
Rudyard Kipling
They shut the road through the woods,
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you never would know,
That there once was a road through the woods,
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anenomes.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badger rolls at ease,
There once was a road through the woods.
Yet if you enter the woods,
Of a summer evening, late,
When the night air cools on the trout-ringed pools
And the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods...
But there is no road through the woods...
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