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



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.

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.