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.