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 . . .
Rudyard Kipling’s The Way through the Woods, with its ‘spine-tingling opening, mourning the loss of Arcadia’ was featured in Walter de la Mare’s Come Hither: A Collection of Rhymes and Poems for the Young of All Ages, which Victoria Neumark wrote about in Slightly Foxed issue 43. This detail is taken from Agnes Miller Parker’s haunting wood engraving, which illustrated the article.
