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 the 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.
|
Rudyard
Kipling |
Classic Poems |
|
[ If ] [ The Way Through the Woods ] [ Danny Deever ] [ Recessional ] [ Tommy ] [ The White Man's Burden ] [ Chant-Pagan ] [ The Deep Sea Cables ] [ The Dykes ] [ Gunga Din ] [ The Gods of the Copybook Headings ] [ Fuzzy-Wuzzy ] [ The Land ] [ The Old Men ] [ My Rival ] |