Poetry meme from sally_maria and others

[wellinghall]

When you see this, post your favourite poem.

The Road Through the Woods, by Rudyard Kipling

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.

Comments

[pellegrina.livejournal.com]

That poem always reminds me of this one by Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth

Then took the other as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet, knowing how way leads onto way
I doubted if I should ever come back

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence
Two roads diverged in a wood
And I took the one less traveled by
And that has made all the difference

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

Oh, I didn't know that one - thanks :-)

[clarienne.livejournal.com]

Oh - that must be where 'the road less travelled' comes from. :)

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

There's an alternat(iv)e history anthology called "Roads less travelled".

[segh.livejournal.com]

I did Robert Frost for A-level; he was almost the only part of A-level I enjoyed. (I loathed the process of getting an education, it always annoyed me that people assume that because one's clever one likes learning things.) I'm quite sick of "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" but I love this:
Seek not in me the big I capital,
Not yet the little dotted in me seek.
If I have in me any I at all,
‘Tis the iota subscript of the Greek.

So small am I as an attention beggar.
The letter you will find me subscript to
Is neither alpha, eta, nor omega,
But upsilon which is the Greek for you.

And also one of my favourite quotations:
"Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in."

"I should have called it
Something you somehow haven’t to deserve."

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

My English stopped at O level (A in Language, C in Literature).

[segh.livejournal.com]

I got a B at A-level. Also B in Latin and C in Greek. I had barely paid attention in class for two years. How did I get into Oxford? Aced the general paper. In those days they tested you on whether you could think, not what you knew. I'd hardly get into an ex-poly nowadays.

[philmophlegm.livejournal.com]

BBC then is supposedly equivalent to AAB now - you'd get into most universities with that.

[kargicq.livejournal.com]

Oh, I wish I'd done Frost for A-level! Do you know his The Silken Tent? (And I like SbWoaSE, so there.)

[segh.livejournal.com]

Yes, I liked it before it got put on posters and set by Eric Whitaker and stuff . . .
What I like best about Frost are the ones like Home Burial and Death of the Hired Man, where he makes the people's voices - kind of like Browning.
I don't know the Silken Tent, but will make haste to.

[inamac.livejournal.com]

That is one of my favourite poems too - I tend to recite it while walking through the local woods (and the Robert Frost below), now I have to find one to post to my journal...