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The Way Through the Woods

2024-10-29 · 00:00 UTC ·Rudyard Kipling ·1 min read

Brief

This classic poem from Kipling's 1910 collection 'Rewards and Fairies' presents a meditation on how nature reclaims human infrastructure when abandoned. The poem describes a road that was deliberately closed and allowed to return to wilderness, with trees planted over it and natural vegetation covering all traces of its existence. The narrative structure moves from the physical reality of the lost road to a supernatural element, where phantom horsemen continue to use the path as if it still existed. The poem's final line - 'But there is no road through the woods' - serves as both literal truth and metaphysical statement about the persistence of memory and purpose beyond physical form.

Why it matters

Kipling's poem explores the theme of infrastructure reclaimed by nature:

Key details

  • [theme] A road closed 70 years ago has been completely erased by natural regrowth
  • [imagery] Only wildlife and a gamekeeper now inhabit the former thoroughfare
  • [supernatural] Ghostly riders still traverse the vanished path on summer evenings
Source evidence

title: The Way Through the Woods
author: Rudyard Kipling
contenttype: article
publication: Poets.org - Academy of American Poets
published: 2024-10-29T00:00:00
sourceurl: https://poets.org/poem/way-through-woods

word_count: 176

The Way Through the Woods

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.

From *Rewards and Fairies *(Doubleday, Page & Company, 1910) by Rudyard Kipling. This poem is in the public domain.