"The Way Through the Woods" by 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.
The poem with the stressed
syllables underlined:
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.
Notes:
The structure of this poem is very
interesting. Poems of this complicated
structure are typically not long. Long
poems typically have a much more
simple structure: couplets of alternatively
rhyming lines. In this poem, the 2nd and
4th line rhyme, then an unrhyming line
separates it from the next part of the poem
in which the 6th, 8th, 9th and 11th line
rhyme with each other. The two verses
are essentially three quatrains squashed
together, with an extra line at the end.
Within the third and 7th line there is an
internal rhyme: rain/gain, neath/heath,
cools/pools, beat/feet. Internal rhymes
like this are a feature of Irish Gaelic
poetry and some Irish folk songs in
English. I think that it is very likely
that Kipling heard such Irish folk songs
from Irishmen in the British army.
The poem conveys a feeling of
nostalgia for the past. Namely, how you
can remember a thing so clearly that
does not exist anymore, when you
return to where you experienced it. In
this case, the road through a woods.
The poet says: "yet, if you enter the
woods... you will hear the beat of a
horse's feet". By "you" he means
himself. He can still imagine those
things, because he heard them once;
anyone was did not would not hear
them. Nostalgia for the past has
always been a popular subject for
poems and songs until recently. The
Beatles' "In my Life" and Van
Morrison's "Brown-eyed Girl" are
ridiculous songs by young men
yearning for their not-too-long-ago
past, but clearly they are following
a convention of doing so.
Everyone feels nostalgic for
places that do not exist anymore or
are not the same, one almost feels
like a ghost or a visitor from
another planet, when you revisit
them. This is the eerie feeling
expressed in this poem. The last extra
line is particularly effective in
creating the haunting and dramatic
feeling that the poet/speaker is
trying to convince himself that
the road is gone, but he cannot
believe it.
"The swish of a skirt in the dew"
appears to be interpreted by most
people to be a reference to a
to a female's skirt, perhaps a
female riding a horse. It seems to me,
however, that it refers to the skirt of
a wagon or carriage, The words
"horse's feet" and "cantering through"
refer to a horse, not a woman, and
seem all part of the same thought.
The skirt of a car, is that part below
the door, so I assume that that might
might be what some people called the
lower part of a carriage or cart too.
Or it may refer to a decorative skirt
put over a cart or carriage for some
celebration.
The "road" in question is surely
just two ribbons of bare earth created
by the constant passage of wheeled
vehicles, of a sort that you see in the
country.
You can hear and see me reciting
this poem at:
