487. The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling
b"R Kipling read by Classic Poetry Aloud:\\nhttp://www.classicpoetryaloud.com/\\n\\nGiving voice to the poetry of the past.\\n\\n---------------------------------------\\n\\nThe Way Through the Woods\\nby Rudyard Kipling (1865 \\u2013 1936)\\n\\nThey shut the road through the woods\\nSeventy years ago.\\nWeather and rain have undone it again,\\nAnd now you would never know\\nThere was once a road through the woods\\nBefore they planted the trees.\\nIt is underneath the coppice and heath,\\nAnd the thin anemones.\\nOnly the keeper sees\\nThat, where the ring-dove broods,\\nAnd the badgers roll at ease,\\nThere was once a road through the woods.\\n\\nYet, if you enter the woods\\nOf a summer evening late,\\nWhen the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools\\nWhere the otter whistles his mate.\\n(They fear not men in the woods,\\nBecause they see so few)\\nYou will hear the beat of a horse's feet,\\nAnd the swish of a skirt in the dew,\\nSteadily cantering through\\nThe misty solitudes,\\nAs though they perfectly knew\\nThe old lost road through the woods. . . .\\nBut there is no road through the woods.\\n\\nFirst aired: 16 July 2007\\n\\nFor hundreds more poetry readings, visit the Classic Poetry Aloud index.\\n\\nReading \\xa9 Classic Poetry Aloud 2009"