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RUDYARD KIPLING. British. 1865-1936,

Kipling is sometimes misunderstood as a Hearty Hooray British in India type of poet, (remember 'If you can keep your head, while all around are losing theirs' etc), but he is much more than 'be a man, my son'.  He is more, too, than his marvellous Just So stories, for which he is rightly famous. Kipling, like many men of his class and time, had a sensitive, superstitious side, that responded to Nature as a force that could never really be either conquered or understood. High Victorianism is about machinery and exploration, Imperialism and control, and a vigorous Christianity that allowed a moral stamp on some very questionable activities, but there is still huge doubt, melancholy, and often a longing for a simpler time. At worst this becomes sentimentality (the invention of Childhood, the idealisation of women, while mistreating both), at best, the art of the time connects with our own doubts and misgivings. We are their future.

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 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
When the otter whistles his mate,
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.