David Hockney The arrival of spring in Woldgate 2011 Exhibited in the Royal Academy David Hockney: A Bigger Picture exhibition
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 keepere sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badger roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.
Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When 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
