595. The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling read by Classic Poetry Aloud

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Giving voice to the poetry of the past.

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The Way Through the Woods

by Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)

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.

Reading © Classic Poetry Aloud, 2007.