'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.
