Poetry Forum

Here we go on the final stretch!

Cheers,
John


The Way through the Woods, 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.


The Listeners, BY WALTER DE LA MARE: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/ ... -listeners

Difficult choice John. They offer such different pleasures. I do have a weakness for a good ghostly narrative

Thanks, Phil - I thought I’d end with something eerie! The late Victorians (and the Edwardians) were pretty good at it.

I love Kipling‘s last line here. He is not all jingoistic bombast!

Cheers,
John

Agreed John. It is a lovely poem. One of my favourite poets is Edward Thomas and the Kipling poem reminds me of his work. Thank you for sharing these poems, which I have enjoyed (and the responses)

Bw

Phil

Edward Thomas is great! There is a shared vocabulary there, i think, though Kipling often yells, it seems to me, and Thomas less so. This is a less yelly Kipling poem.

This was fun to do. Next up would likely have been Browning and Tennyson, but interest seems to be tailing off!

Cheers,
John

Well, I'll be interested John.

OK, I'll post at least that one more tomorrow. Thanks for the vote of confidence!

I have the two poems in mind...

Cheers,
John

Appreciated John. I like to think a while over stuff. Your comment on Donne's flippancy, or rather his being trapped by the flippant style of his early work, has given me another perspective on his later poems I hadn't considered.

Bw

Phil

That's good to hear! It may be a risk in the pursuit of wit at all costs. Interesting question.

Cheers,
John

Ooh, hard to choose! The poems have similar merits, we think. I do remember Gran Teague reading 'The Listeners' to me when I was very young (she died in 1985), so perhaps that poem edges it due to the connection. But the Kipling is a good read too, not least for the details of various animals, such as the ring-dove (^v^)

Cheerie,
F & (^v^)

jisbell00 wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 09, 2023 6:55 pm

It may be a risk in the pursuit of wit at all costs.

Could be John. The infection of cleverness contracts the heart!

I believe exactly that does or can occur. Stop argumenting, the man said to me in Jamaica.

Cheers,
John

I wasn't looking on the site for a couple days, so I didn't see this. That de la Mare poem is one of my all-time favorite poems. It has special meaning to me because the book that poem appeared in was the first poetry book I ever owned. I was an adolescent then. That poem helped me to see how words could be made into art. But I was also a sophisticated enough reader back then to see how the uneven lines made the poem a little awkward.

Thanks, Caleb, nice to have your De La Mare story! He speaks to my adolescence, I would say, and maybe a bit to my childhood. An early memory in any case, and I don't often read him these days.

Cheers,
John