The Way Through the Woods
They shut the way through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a way through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and the 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.
Rudyard Kipling
This poem happened to me a couple weeks ago.
I was driving down some back roads in the countryside where I'd lived years ago. Everything was so familiar. Each curve of the road brought back memories. Trees even, were familiar. The farms, the riverbank, the train tracks and the way the cattails swayed in the ditch alongside the road were like the past come to life.
But then I came to a dead-end.
The road up the hill was blocked off. It was so strange, beyond the barrier was only forest.
There was no road at all.
Completely overgrown! No sign even of a path. Trees, underbrush, ferns, nothing else. It was almost as if I had been wrong, as if I had never traveled there, as if I had imagined or dreamed all the times we had driven around the sharp corners, hit the potholes, splashed through the puddles.
I couldn't shake off the feeling afterward. I calculated in my head - it had been two years since I'd last driven up that road. Only two years!
So when I read this poem, I thought - it's the ghost of a road he's writing about.
An unearthly, eerie feeling. It's still with me.
How quickly, how completely things can be erased!
