| They shut the road through the woods
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| Seventy years ago.
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| Weather and rain have undone it again,
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| And now you would never know
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| There was once a road through the woods
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| Before they planted the trees.
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| It is underneath the coppice and heath,
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| And the thin anemones.
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| Only the keeper sees
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| That, where the ring-dove broods,
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| And the badgers roll at ease,
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| There was once a road through the woods.
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| Yet, if you enter the woods
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| Of a summer evening late,
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| When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
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| Where the otter whistles his mate.
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| (They fear not men in the woods,
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| Because they see so few)
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| You will hear the beat of a horse’s feet,
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| And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
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| Steadily cantering through
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| The misty solitudes,
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| As though they perfectly knew
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| The old lost road through the woods.. ..
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| But there is no road through the woods. |