How often she has gazed from castle windows o'er,
and watched the daylight passing within her captive wall,
with no-one to heed her call.
The evening hour is fading within the dwindling sun,
and in a lonely moment those embers will be gone
and the last of all the young birds flown.
Her days of precious freedom, forfeited long before,
to live such fruitless years behind a guarded door,
but those days will last no more.
Tomorrow at this hour she will be far away,
much farther than these islands,
or the lonely fotheringay