Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

THEY shut the road through the woods

Seventy years ago.

Weather and rain have undone it again,

And now you would never know

There was once a path through the woods

Before they planted the trees:

It is underneath the coppice and heath,

And the thin anemones.

Only the keeper sees

That, where the ring-dove broods

And the badgers roll at ease,

There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods

Of a summer evening late,

When the night-air cools on the trout-ring’d pools

Where 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.