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 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.

--Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936), British essayist, novelist, and poet