Page:Poems and ballads, third series (IA poemsballadsthir00swin).pdf/21

7

THE COMMONWEAL.

1887.

i.

Eight hundred years and twenty-one

Have shone and sunken since the land
Whose name is freedom bore such brand
As marks a captive, and the sun
Beheld her fettered hand.

ii.

But ere dark time had shed as rain

Or sown on sterile earth as seed
That bears no fruit save tare and weed
An age and half an age again,
She rose on Runnymede.