The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #61387   Message #986665
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
19-Jul-03 - 03:19 PM
Thread Name: Lyr/Tune Req: The Way through the Woods (Kipling)
Subject: ADD: The Road Through the Woods (Kipling)
Any collection of Kipling's verse would have it.

Or just type the line into Google, of course - The Way through the Woods

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.