From: STAAAAN@CAAAN.COM   
      
   '...Tom finished by reading a poem from Rewards and Fairies, 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.   
      
   That mix of the bucolic and mystagogic comes like a pleasant cool autumnal   
   breeze after the brilliant hot sand and ginger of the louder Kipling and   
   also deposes the lazy idea that Kipling was some sort of foaming bullyboy   
   with a fountain pen. As Orwell notes, and as we enlarged upon, to accuse   
   Kipling of being a fascist is like denouncing Shakespeare for not writing   
   about the atom bomb (though you'll probably find a hand metaphor for an atom   
   bomb in Shakespeare). '   
      
   ROBBIE   
   --   
   Caviar to the General   
   http://london.journalspace.com/   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)