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 . . .

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.

About the contributor

Agnes Miller Parker was born in Ayrshire in 1895 and studied painting at the Glasgow School of Art. Despite no formal training in the art of wood engraving, her richly detailed prints brought the text of many books to life, including Bates’s classic work Through the Woods as well as The Fables of Aesop, Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Shakespeare’s Richard II and some of Hardy’s most famous novels.