The speaker follows a new trail through autumn woods, noticing acorns and conkers scattered in abundance and the small signs of animals feeding. The scene feels rich and unhurried; even the thought of an adder passing by brings no fear, only calm respect. Memory then opens into a wider landscape: a pasture with cowslips and bluebells, a stream where a cygnet is taken by an otter while birds look on, a willow shading a newt, and a heather-covered hill where the speaker once paused for dandelion wine. Throughout, the speaker’s attention is tender and precise, accepting both beauty and small violences as part of the same world. The closing address to “my children” widens the poem into a gentle plea: do not forget that such a world exists. The mood is quiet, elegiac, and full of watchful love.
A Path — Summary
Along the new trail, built by no one I knew, acorns had fallen by thousands, more than enough to leave creatures dazed by too much fortune. Conkers have tumbled among them, each experimentally chipped and then rejected by some set of tiny teeth. Hazel nuts were better, it seems. Should an adder pass en route to denning, amid this rich mast, amid this late fall of goldened leaves of ash and beech, I might merely step aside, unalarmed as any fattened squirrel.
Across the pasture, I remember, past the partly shaded ferns, cowslips, bluebells, buttercups of spring and summer, where falling water, catkin-patterned, drowned out the cygnet's cry in an otter's teeth (witnessed by a kingfisher, two low-flying larks and a heron), a willow had leaned to hide that tiny sorrow and also shade a loafing spotted newt.
The hill behind, where bees sought nectar of a kind from sunburnt heather, swept up to a copse of oak, wrapped in a druid's dream of mistletoe and ivy. There I had paused for dandelion wine.
Perhaps the trail will help some find this place. My children, do not forget there is a world.