My Poem of the Week: 'The Way through the Woods' by Rudyard Kipling

[narya_flame]

A day late this week because of real life stuff, but I wanted to do it anyway.  Chat welcome in the comments.

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.

(I won't bother linking to an online bio of Rudyard Kipling; there are plenty out there.  I recently came across this poem collected here, but just the first stanza.  I remembered studying it at school; I hadn't thought about it for about fifteen years, but I immediately knew something was missing, and went looking for the poem in its entirety.)

Comments

[spiced_wine]

Oh I love this poem! It was one of the first I learned, I just loved the atmosphere it evoked.

[narya_flame]

Yes, same, I love the interplay between what is and what was, and permanence and impermanence - what the land remembers versus what people remember/see.

[spiced_wine]

what the land remembers versus what people remember/see.

Yes! And I’ve known such places. Liminal places.

[keiliss]

I have never seen this before, thank you so much for sharing it!

'the land remembers' That phrase is a story in itself.

[narya_flame]

You're welcome 🤗

I have made a note of that phrase for possible use as a fic title!

[hhimring]

I am very fond of this one. I first read it in "Rewards and Fairies". I think that may be its original setting?

[narya_flame]

Yes, I think you're right!

I'm fond of it too. A nostalgic haunting, rather than a creepy one - and apt for the times, in a way, with new things growing over the old.

[spiced_wine]

I always really liked Puck’s Song, but now thanks to Brexit and people behaving like racist aresholes, I now think it sounds Nationalistic, or to admit you like it might be construed that way, so now I’m embarrassed about liking it.

[narya_flame]

Hmm, yes, Kipling and his narrative of England is an interesting one. I adore Puck of Pook's Hill, but looking at it through adult eyes, I notice the English exceptionalism far more than I did as a child. And Puck's Song...mostly I read that as affection for the land, and encouraging awareness of the stories our surroundings tell, the interconnected nature of past and present, but I agree it's hard to divorce it from the views Kipling expresses in, say, The White Man's Burden.

That said, I don't think there's anything the matter with loving the England that has inspired writers from John Clare through to Tolkien - I think it's a very human thing to feel that connection with a place and its past. I think it becomes a problem when people get it stuck in their heads that their history and origins somehow make them superior, and forget or just aren't aware that history is full of terrible decisions and awful people, as well as the things people prefer to commemorate. I don't know why Great Britain, and latterly England in particular, feels so prone to this; it can't all be explained by WW2 or even the Empire, it goes back much further than that. Maybe it's being on an island, who knows!

[spiced_wine]

I think it's a very human thing to feel that connection with a place and its past. I think it becomes a problem when people get it stuck in their heads that their history and origins somehow make them superior, and forget or just aren't aware that history is full of terrible decisions and awful people, as well as the things people prefer to commemorate. I don't know why Great Britain, and latterly England in particular, feels so prone to this; it can't all be explained by WW2 or even the Empire, it goes back much further than that. Maybe it's being on an island, who knows!

I have no idea! I mean, I love Wales, but for its landscape and poetry and that feels like a love that has nothing to do with superiority, just a love of the beauty of something. I don’t know why English exceptionalism has surfaced so much either. Nothing wrong in being proud of your countries good achievements, wherever you live. I don’t think an Empire built on stuffing a lot of the world is worth being proud of, though.

Maybe it is being an island, yes, it might foster that kind of belief and thought of being different.

[narya_flame]

I don’t think an Empire built on stuffing a lot of the world is worth being proud of, though.

Well, no, of course not. I meant that Empire is often pointed at as the source of this idea of exceptionalism, which I'm not sure it is - although possibly the latter days of Empire are when that notion took hold in the popular imagination, as I imagine before then that the vast majority of people were too busy just trying to survive. I'm speculating, though; this isn't something I've studied in detail!

Anyway, it's a difficult line to walk. I love stately homes for their aesthetic and history, but part of that history is the enforcement of an oppressive system and in many cases profiting from slavery, directly or otherwise. It's one of the reasons I haven't yet published my pair of stories set at Theo's home; I keep questioning what I'm doing, whether I'm fawning over something better condemned. Similarly, it was a family tradition growing up that we always watched Last Night of the Proms, but it's hard not to wince at elements of that now! (Well, some of it has always been cringeworthy, but the ideas behind it felt distant enough that you could kind of blush and shrug it off. Not any more.)

[spiced_wine]

Anyway, it's a difficult line to walk. I love stately homes for their aesthetic and history, but part of that history is the enforcement of an oppressive system and in many cases profiting from slavery, directly or otherwise. It's one of the reasons I haven't yet published my pair of stories set at Theo's home; I keep questioning what I'm doing, whether I'm fawning over something better condemned.

I don’t think it would come across like that. People do live in these places, and Theo happens to be one of them. They can’t be ‘cancelled’, or they can, but the people born into this kind of class and money aren’t always entitled horrors. Some of them have the money to do important things, like rewinding projects, organic farming, looking after the people in their local village. Theo exists, and his home exists and Harrison said his people were okay, quite normal, didn’t he?

And clearly there is an audience, or series like the Crown wouldn’t be so popular. (It’s not my thing, but people clearly lap that up and there’s privilege right there!)

And yes, Last Night of the Proms. I watched it sometimes, but as you say, it seemed more of a distant nostalgia thing then, and a chance for a singalong at the end. It was more like a nod back at the past, nothing more.

[narya_flame]

I do enjoy The Crown, I don't think it particularly romanticises the institution or its lifestyle; in a way it's very humanising. I thought Charles's time at Aberystwyth was really well done, especially.

But yes, you're right about Theo, and Harrison did say his family are fairly normal - they just happen to have a very big house! As for being an entitled horror...well, Theo can be XD not all the time, though, and I think he's past the worst of it now.

[spiced_wine]

But yes, you're right about Theo, and Harrison did say his family are fairly normal - they just happen to have a very big house! As for being an entitled horror...well, Theo can be XD not all the time, though, and I think he's past the worst of it now.

It did Theo good to be with the others! Yes, it felt at the end of Paradox as if he’d turned a corner.

[oloriel]

Great Britain/England aren't really uncommonly prone to this; you can catch glimpses of it in Polish and Czech art, French writing, and definitely (oh dear God) German. It's not even a purely European thing, because the Japanese are definitely doing it too (Nihonjinron - "the study of why the Japanese are special" - is a very real and very creepy academic field, not by outsiders but by the Japanese themselves). Unfortunately, it seems to be a general human trait to glorify the history (and places) of their own group, to present themselves as exceptional and their neighbours as inferior.

We're probably more aware of the phenomenon among the British/English because of the special role of the English language, which in turn leads to a prevalence of English literature, which in turn offers itself more widely for study. That, of course, is largely a result fo the Empire - but that doesn't mean that it started there, or that England is doing this more strongly than (say) France.

[narya_flame]

A fair point! I had thought about this; I have French family and I do get glimpses of French exceptionalism via them, but since I don't live there it's hard to get a grip on how prevalent it is - it doesn't feel like the sort of thing I should be offering my views on without a lot more study, observation and thought.

[oloriel]

I honestly can't attest to how prevalent it is now, but it's definitely heavy in the late 19th/early 20th century literature I came into contact with.

[oloriel]

I didn't know this one before, but I like it - the contrast between purely descriptive to glimpses of the supernatural, and the imagery itself. (There's a road through the forest nearby that was closed 15 years ago, and it's already on its way to disappearing, so of course I thought of that immediately, too. No otters in our woods, though, and the trout pools have fallen dry!)

[narya_flame]

It's a lovely poem, one of my favourites of his. And yes, the otters...they're in a better state in the UK now than they have been for a while, but they did almost go extinct in the 70s :( which I doubt Kipling would have foreseen.