The Way Through The Woods by Rudyard Kipling
Kipling read by Classic Poetry Aloud:\nhttp://classicpoetryaloud.podomatic.com/\n\nGiving voice to classic poetry.\n\n---------------------------------------------------\n\nThe Way Through The Woods\nby Rudyard Kipling\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.