Page:Oxford Book of English Verse 1250-1900.djvu/1078

 'You have loved me, Fair, three lives—or days: 'Twill pass with the passing of my face. But where I 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-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 leavèd rhyme lies safe, I deem, Shelter'd and shut in a nook of rhyme, From the reaper man, and his reaper Time.

Love! I fall into the claws of Time: But lasts within a leavèd rhyme All that the world of me esteems— My wither'd dreams, my wither'd dreams.