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Poem by George Walter Thornbury The Wiltshire Cairn 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. George Walter Thornbury George Walter Thornbury's other poems: 1182 Views |
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