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

  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,

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,

  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

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

  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

Of flying smoke,—that is the train;

  Fast burrowing in the tunnelled cliff.