Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900.
Francis Thompson. 18591907875. The Poppy
SUMMER set lip to earth’s bosom bare, | |
And left the flush’d print in a poppy there; | |
Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came, | |
And the fanning wind puff’d it to flapping flame. | |
With burnt mouth red like a lion’s it drank | 5 |
The blood of the sun as he slaughter’d sank, | |
And dipp’d its cup in the purpurate shine | |
When the eastern conduits ran with wine. | |
Till it grew lethargied with fierce bliss, | |
And hot as a swinkèd gipsy is, | 10 |
And drowsed in sleepy savageries, | |
With mouth wide a-pout for a sultry kiss. | |
A child and man paced side by side, | |
Treading the skirts of eventide; | |
But between the clasp of his hand and hers | 15 |
Lay, felt not, twenty wither’d years. | |
She turn’d, with the rout of her dusk South hair, | |
And saw the sleeping gipsy there; | |
And snatch’d and snapp’d it in swift child’s whim, | |
With—’Keep it, long as you live!’—to him. | 20 |
And his smile, as nymphs from their laving meres, | |
Trembled up from a bath of tears; | |
And joy, like a mew sea-rock’d apart, | |
Toss’d on the wave of his troubled heart. | |
For he saw what she did not see, | 25 |
That—as kindled by its own fervency— | |
The verge shrivell’d inward smoulderingly: | |
And suddenly ‘twixt his hand and hers | |
He knew the twenty wither’d years— | |
No flower, but twenty shrivell’d years. | 30 |
‘Was never such thing until this hour,’ | |
Low to his heart he said; ‘the flower | |
Of sleep brings wakening to me, | |
And of oblivion memory.’ | |
‘Was never this thing to me,’ he said, | 35 |
‘Though with bruisèd poppies my feet are red!’ | |
And again to his own heart very low: | |
‘O child! I love, for I love and know; | |
‘But you, who love nor know at all | |
The diverse chambers in Love’s guest-hall, | 40 |
Where some rise early, few sit long: | |
In how differing accents hear the throng | |
His great Pentecostal tongue; | |
‘Who know not love from amity, | |
Nor my reported self from me; | 45 |
A fair fit gift is this, meseems, | |
You give—this withering flower of dreams. | |
‘O frankly fickle, and fickly true, | |
Do you know what the days will do to you? | |
To your Love and you what the days will do, | 50 |
O frankly fickle, and fickly true? | |
‘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. | 55 |
‘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! | 60 |
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: | 65 |
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 | 70 |
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, | 75 |
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. | 80 |