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.
Line 20 There has seen much debate about the meaning of "skirt" at this point with 3 basic meanings predominant.
either
a 'skirt' is the hairy part of a horse tail
or
a "skirt" is an archaic word for part of a saddle
or
a "skirt" is an item of woman's clothing.
There is a apparently a letter from Kipling to his sister about a poem with a phantom and a female rider (See Kipling Society web site) but the poem is unspecified and the point is still in doubt as to which of the 3 legitimate references Kipling intended.
As in many things the readers are invited to interpret the meaning for themselves.
