The Way through the Woods

The old lost road through the woods …

When Kipling writes in a lyric mood the effect can be superb, like the eerie magic of “the old lost road through the woods“.

In Kipling’s story ‘Marklake Witches’, for which ‘The Way through the Woods’ is a kind of preface, a young girl remarks, “I like all those funny little roads that don’t lead anywhere”. This sentence was the seed from which the poem developed.

At first glance it looks as if the poem has no structure, yet in fact it has a very sophisticated one. The rhyme pattern of the second verse exactly duplicates that of the first, with the last line doubled to enhance the effect. Each verse has an elaborate rhyming pattern with the sound of “woods“, “broods” or “solitudes” ending the first, fifth, tenth and twelfth line; another rhyme concluding the second and forth lines; still another terminating the sixth, eighth, ninth and eleventh lines; while the third and the seventh lines have internal rhymes. This remarkable poetic craftsmanship of Kipling adds a lot to the subtle effect of the poem.

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.

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