I really need help with what this poem is about. I've been looking on the internet for ages and nothing seems to make sense to me
Here's the text to start with
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.
The poem goes with the story The Marklake Witches" from Rewards and Fairies"
It's a straight forward poem. Seventy years ago the road was closed and trees have grown up so you can no longer find where the road went through the woods. But if you go into the woods at late evening, and not many do, you'll hear noises that sound just as if people were riding through the woods along the old road that isn't there any more.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 01/06/2007 01:54PM by Linda.