' You have loved me, Fair, three Uves — or days : 

 'Twill pass with the passing of my face. 

 But where / go your face goes too, 

 To watch lest I play false to you. 



' I am but, my sweet, your foster-lover. 

 Knowing well when certain years are over 

 You vanish from me to another ; 

 Yet I know, and love, like the foster-mother, 



' So, frankly fickle, and fickly true ! 

 For my brief life-while I take from you 

 This token, fair and fit, meseems, 

 For me — this withering flower of dreams.' 



The sleep-flower sways in the wheat its head. 

 Heavy with dreams, as that with bread : 

 The goodly grain and the sun-flushed sleeper 

 The reaper reaps, and Time the reaper. 



I hang 'mid men my needless head. 

 And my fruit is dreams, as theirs is bread : 

 The goodly men and the sun-hazed sleeper 

 Time shall reap, but after the reaper 

 The world shall glean of me, the sleeper. 



Love, love ! your flower of withered dream 

 In leaved rhyme lies safe, I deem. 

 Sheltered and shut in a nook of rh3Tne, 

 From the reaper man, and his reaper Time. 



Love ! / fall into the claws of Time : 



But lasts within a leaved rhyme 



All that the world of me esteems — 



My withered dreams, my withered dreams. 



FRANCIS THOMPSON. 



54 



