“Trackway and Camp and City lost, / Salt Marsh where now is corn”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, more Kipling, with a more haunting trace of the past:

The Way Through the Woods, Rudyard Kipling

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.


First published in 1910 in Rewards and Fairies, the sequel to Puck of Pook’s Hill, as the endnote to “Marklake Witches.” It was probably written in 1899, shortly before his daughter’s death at age eight, for a friend of his daughter after the two had a day in the woods alone where they had an experience they attributed to ghosts. I love the subtle effect of adding that extra line in the second stanza.

---L.

Subject quote from Puck’s Song, from “Weland’s Sword,” Puck of Pook’s Hill, Rudyard Kipling.