The Way Through The Woods [KIPLING poem set to music]
Channel: tobydarling
Date: 2014-02-14

This is a new version of the video I posted in 2013 to correct the guitar tuning.

I was reminded of this poem by Kipling when visiting his house, Bateman's, yesterday in East Sussex. Kipling published it in 1892 after a visit to the New Forest in Hampshire.

For the music I used a theme from an earlier instrumental piece I composed last year: Largo, which is uploaded here too, and for which the score is available free from free-scores.com

The video comes from a wood of yew trees on Winchester Hill, Hampshire.

The Way Through The Woods (Kipling)


C  Cm
THEY shut the road through the woods
C9 G
Seventy years ago. 
Am C
Weather and rain have undone it again, 
Dm
And now you would never know 
G
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.

F C
Yet, if you enter the woods 
Dm Em
Of a summer evening late, 
Am Em
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools 
Dm G
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, 

C Dm
Steadily cantering through 
C Dm
The misty solitudes, 
G F
As though they perfectly knew 
C Dm
The old lost road through the woods.

C Cm C9 G
But there is no road through the woods.