| |
| CARADOC with the golden torque, | |
| Amber anklets and sword of bronze, | |
| A wolf-skin clothing his giant limbs | |
| Tawny with thirty summers’ suns, | |
| Was slain beneath those great beech-trees | 5 |
| By Roman spearmen, who had found | |
| His last retreat, and burnt his hut, | |
| And dragged his wife in fetters bound. | |
| |
| Now see the mound, that scarcely swells | |
| Above the level of the downs, | 10 |
| Upon whose summit, dry and sear, | |
| Ground-thistles spread their purple crowns; | |
| While round it nets the dry crisp thyme | |
| The bees love so: those old trees wave | |
| Just where the Roman spearmen struck, | 15 |
| And Caradoc had here his grave. | |
| |
| ’T was fourteen hundred years ago; | |
| And now the thrush upon the thorn | |
| Sings heedless of that chieftain’s fate; | |
| And on this golden July morn | 20 |
| A little butterfly, all blue, | |
| In the mid air is hovering | |
| Around the flowering grass that grows | |
| Above the ashes of the king. | |
| |
| And far away the cornfields stretch | 25 |
| In golden sections, fading dim | |
| To the gray ridge of farther down; | |
| That burring murmur is the hymn | |
| Of the great conqueror Steam, the chief | |
| Of new reformers. See that whiff | 30 |
| Of flying smoke,—that is the train; | |
| Fast burrowing in the tunnelled cliff. | |
| |
