“The Way Through the Woods,” by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Selected for Immortal Muse by Zireaux (read Zireaux’s comments on this poem)

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.

From the New York Times, March 7, 1899

Zireaux’s comments on these poems:
Last year, my kindly non-judgmental reader, we visited the works of Poe, Updike, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Wallace Stevens, St. Vincent Millay, P. Gardenne, Melville, Lee O’Neil, Keats, Keats, Keats, more Keats, Stephen Colbert, Notorious B.I.G., Stevens again, Coleridge, Larkin, Bryan Walpert, Mark Twain, Terina Kingi, The Flight of the Conchords, Elizabeth Bishop, and the magnificent Mary McCallum.

But how could a year go by, so many words, without a single mention of Kipling? In fact, it didn’t. It can’t. I searched this blog for “Rudyard” or “Kipling” and there he is — four different posts — not as sitter, not as subject, but ever lurking over my shoulder, an inescapable shade.

So let us turn around. Look the master in the eye. Kipling was somewhere in his 40s when he composed “The Way through the Woods.” He was living in Sussex, England, his copious literary outburst perhaps more a kind of psychological bleeding, or rather an engrossment, an immersion in childhood fantasies that, despite the fullness of their enchantments, could never quite protect him (how could they?) from the creeping ache of despair caused by the death of his six-year-old daughter, whose ghostly skirt, in “The Way Through the Woods,” we seem to hear “swishing in the dew.”

This was no longer the writer of The Jungle Book or of Kim, possibly the best Indian-English novel ever written, and more deservingly belonging to India — if great books can belong to countries (they can’t) — than the works of just about any contemporary writer of Indian-English fiction. Nor is this the same writer of that most popular poem, “If” (1895), often referred to as “hortatory verse,” and which — as art has no obvious utility other than to capture, as precisely as possible, its creator’s passion — can hardly be called a work of art.

Rather, this is the America-touched, America-inspired and introspecting Kipling. The “Seventy years ago” of the second line sets us near the timeframe of the French Revolution of 1848, the California goldrush, our dear New Zealand’s birth, but most important of all, it takes us directly to Ulalume, the requiem of Edgar Allan Poe, the woodland lament to lost love (and first of my Tuesday Poems). It was in America, in that northeastern dark and dolorous climate of Poe, that Kipling spent his time with his daughter; and in the story which accompanies “A Way Through the Woods,” the Marklate Witches, about a free-spirited young girl insouciantly dying of pneumonia (from which Kipling’s daughter died), the heroine’s name is, in fact, Philadelphia.

What Poe achieves with sound and meter, Kipling delivers with rhythm. In each of the two stanzas, the lilting flourish of the first two quatrains — trimeters rising (Poe-tently) to an internally rhyming tetrameter (rain/again, underneath/heath, cools/pools, beat/feet) — vanishes and flattens in the third quatrain. The song, as does all beauty, as does every love, fades into “misty solitudes.” It’s the out-of-place final line, the thirteenth in the second stanza, that delivers the poem’s haunting antipodal blow. There once was, but there is no more. “There is no road through the woods.”

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