Songs from Books. Rudyard Kipling

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      _Cities and Thrones and Powers,

        Stand in Time's eye,

      Almost as long as flowers,

        Which daily die.

      But, as new buds put forth

        To glad new men,

      Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,

        The Cities rise again.

      This season's Daffodil,

        She never hears,

      What change, what chance, what chill,

        Cut down last year's:

      But with bold countenance,

        And knowledge small,

      Esteems her seven days' continuance

        To be perpetual.

      So Time that is o'er-kind,

        To all that be,

      Ordains us e'en as blind,

        As bold as she:

      That in our very death,

        And burial sure,

      Shadow to shadow, well persuaded, saith,

        'See how our works endure!'_

      I am the land of their fathers.

      In me the virtue stays.

      I will bring back my children,

      After certain days.

      Under their feet in the grasses

      My clinging magic runs.

      They shall return as strangers,

      They shall remain as sons.

      Over their heads in the branches

      Of their new-bought, ancient trees,

      I weave an incantation

      And draw them to my knees.

      Scent of smoke in the evening.

      Smell of rain in the night,

      The hours, the days and the seasons,

      Order their souls aright;

      Till I make plain the meaning

      Of all my thousand years —

      Till I fill their hearts with knowledge.

      While I fill their eyes with tears.

      See you the ferny ride that steals

      Into the oak-woods far?

      O that was whence they hewed the keels

      That rolled to Trafalgar.

      And mark you where the ivy clings

      To Bayham's mouldering walls?

      O there we cast the stout railings

      That stand around St. Paul's.

      See you the dimpled track that runs

      All hollow through the wheat?

      O that was where they hauled the guns

      That smote King Philip's fleet.

      Out of the Weald, the secret Weald,

      Men sent in ancient years,

      The horse-shoes red at Flodden Field,

      The arrows at Poitiers.

      See you our little mill that clacks,

      So busy by the brook?

      She has ground her corn and paid her tax

      Ever since Domesday Book.

      See you our stilly woods of oak?

      And the dread ditch beside?

      O that was where the Saxons broke

      On the day that Harold died.

      See you the windy levels spread

      About the gates of Rye?

      O that was where the Northmen fled,

      When Alfred's ships came by.

      See you our pastures wide and lone,

      Where the red oxen browse?

      O there was a City thronged and known.

      Ere London boasted a house.

      And see you, after rain, the trace

      Of mound and ditch and wall?

      O that was a Legion's camping-place,

      When Cæsar sailed from Gaul.

      And see you marks that show and fade,

      Like shadows on the Downs?

      O they are the lines the Flint Men made,

      To guard their wondrous towns.

      Trackway and Camp and City lost,

      Salt Marsh where now is corn;

      Old Wars, old Peace, old Arts that cease,

      And so was England born!

      She is not any common Earth,

      Water or wood or air,

      But Merlin's Isle of Gramarye,

      Where you and I will fare.

      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!