FRANCIS THOMPSON

4 You have loved me, Fair, three lives 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 I

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-flush'd 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, me the sleeper !

Love ! love ! your flower of wither'd dream In leaved rhyme lies safe, I deem, Shelter'd and shut in a nook of rhyme, 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 wither'd dreams, my wither'd dreams.

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