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Home  »  The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse  »  Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936)

Arthur Quiller-Couch, comp. The Oxford Book of Victorian Verse. 1922.

The Way through the Woods

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 path 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-ring’d 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.