A Kipling Poem

A poem by Rudyard Kipling 

The way through the woods

 

They shut the road through the woods, Seventy years ago,

Weather and rain have undone it again,   And know you would never know

there was once a road through the woods, before they planted trees.

Is is underneath the coppice and heath, and the thin anemones

only he keeper sees, that where the ring dove broods

and they roll at ease.

There was once a road through the woods, Yes, if you enter the woods

of a summer evening late,when the night airs cools on the trout -ringed pools

where the offer whistles his mate,they fear not men in the woods

because they see so few, you will hear the beat of a horses feet

and the swish of a skirt in the dew.

Steadily cantering through, the misty solitaires

as thought they perfectly knew,  the old lost road through the woods

But there is not no road through the woods.