Rewards and Fairies

The Way Through the Woods

     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 road 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-ringed 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!