I am often asked which poems are my favourites. It is, of course, an impossible question. As with so many things my favourite poems change according to the seasons, my mood, what I am reading at the time and even which anthology I am compiling. With each new anthology I make new discoveries and remember old favourites. That said, there are certain poems of which I am particularly fond. Ones which, if I can, I include in most anthologies. Here are two about woodland:
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. Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
The Woods of Westermain
Verse 1
Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare Nothing harms beneath the leaves More than waves a swimmer cleaves. Toss your heart up with the lark, Foot at pace with mouse and worm, Fair you fare.
Only at the dread of dark Quaver, and they quit their form: Thousand eyeballs under hoods Have you by the hair. Enter these enchanted woods, You who dare.
George Meredith (1828-1909)
