The Way Through the Woods by Rudyard Kipling     presented by Dharmendra Sheth, Surat
Channel: Fluentlingua
Date: 2019-03-07

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.

END