Running along a bank, a parapet
That saves from the precipitous wood below
The level road, there is a path. It serves
Children for looking down the long smooth steep,
Between the legs of beech and yew, to where
A fallen tree checks the sight: while men and women
Content themselves with the road and what they see
Over the bank, and what the children tell.
‘This item is from The First World War Poetry Digital Archive, University of Oxford (www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit); © Edward Thomas, 1979, reproduced under licence from Faber and Faber Ltd.
The passion Edward Thomas felt for walking and for the roads and paths which act as an intricate network crossing and re-crossing the south of England can be detected from his earliest writing. In a letter he sent to Helen Noble in June 1897 he comments upon how he walks ‘slowly and with downward eyes, almost without a thought’ and in his first published book, The Woodland Life, he presents the reader with the mystery of paths that connect the world of the forest with that of the open country:
When the path takes us out of the wood, we leave the sheltered stillness behind, and feel the cool breath of the breeze that has sprung up with the lifting of the fog. In the foliage of the oaks, still dense and shadowy, three wrens are singing in broken snatches.
The sense of mystery which haunts this early description, the sheltered world of the wood with its density and shadows, is one of the fascinations that paths held for Thomas. As he was to put it in The Icknield Way after commenting that he could not find either the beginning or the end of the path that was the subject of his book:
It is thus a symbol of mortal things with their beginnings and ends always in immortal darkness.
‘The Path’ was written in March 1915 and it recalls the way Thomas’s elder children used to walk and run down Old Stoner Hill near Steep in order to go to Bedales junior school. The opening lines immediately convey an exciting hint of danger in this pathway:
Running along a bank, a parapet
That saves from the precipitous wood below
The level road, there is a path.
Not only is there a hint of the background of war with ‘parapet’ but the placing of ‘precipitous’ with its four syllables surrounded by simple monosyllables almost brings the reader to the edge, only to discover that at the end of the sentence ‘there is a path.’ Edna Longley refers to this remarkable opening in terms of the poem being itself a tricky ‘path’:
It begins by laying down fractal structures that will replicate themselves along the way, especially inversions of expected order.
The children’s perspective, one of imagination, is explored from their own position and they look ‘down the long smooth steep’ as if through the legs of adults although these legs belong to ‘beech and yew’ as if the woodland itself were alive. The almost fairy-tale world opened up within the minds of the children as they use a different path to the ‘men and women’ who ‘Content themselves with the road’ allows the path to become a stream:
The path, winding like silver, trickles on,
Bordered and even invaded by thinnest moss
That tries to cover roots and crumbling chalk
With gold, olive, and emerald, but in vain.
The aureate language here heightens the visionary sense of what the path might lead to although, like the impossibility of regaining the memory that lies on the borders of the mind in ‘Old Man’, the movement ends ‘in vain’.