The Way Through the Woods
The Way Through the Woods - context Summary
Published in 1910
Published in 1910 in the collection Rewards and Fairies, Kipling’s poem imagines a road closed "seventy years ago" and reclaimed by woods. The landscape hides human passage while sensory traces—horse hooves, a swishing skirt, animal life—suggest a persistent, ghostly memory of movement. The poem contrasts disappearance and continuity, portraying nature’s recovery alongside subtle reminders that human routes and habits can survive only in recollection and sound.
Read Complete AnalysesThey 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.
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