Pater Familias: The Poppy

The Poppy

'To Monica'

Francis Thompson

Summer set lip to earth's bosom bare,

And left the flushed print in a poppy there:

Like a yawn of fire from the grass it came,

And the fanning wind puffed it to flapping flame.

With burnt mouth, red like a lion's, it drank

The blood of the sun as he slaughtered sank,

And dipped its cup in the purpurate shine

When the Eastern conduits ran with wine.

Till it grew lethargied with fierce bliss,

And hot as a swinked gipsy is,

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

Lay, felt not, twenty withered years.

She turned, with the rout of her dusk South hair,

And saw the sleeping gipsy there:

And snatched and snapped it in swift child's whim,

With— "Keep it, long as you live!" — to him.

And his smile, as nymphs from their laving meres,

Trembled up from a bath of tears;

And joy, like a mew sea-rocked apart,

Tossed on the wave of his troubled heart.

For he saw what she did not see,

That — as kindled by its own fervency —

The verge shrivelled inward smoulderingly:

And suddenly 'twixt his hand and hers

He knew the twenty withered years —

No flower, but twenty shrivelled years.

"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,

"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,

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;

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,

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.

"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, me the sleeper.

Love, love! your flower of withered dream

In leavèd rhyme lies safe, I deem,

Sheltered 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 withered dreams, my withered dreams.