of long vowels particularly omega, the poetic imagery of the whole and
the drowsy cadence of the last two words give this fragment a combination
of qualities probably not surpassed in any language.” The beautiful
verses about the pippin on the topmost branch we shall quote below. In
another fragment (E. 3) Sappho sees the stars in a way which Tennyson
echoes when he writes: “As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look
beautiful.” Or again Sappho’s love of nature appears in the line (E.
112): “the moon rose full and the maidens took their stand about the
altar.” In the new _Ode to Atthis_ the moon is not silver (as in E. 3)
but rosy-fingered: “after sunset the rosy-fingered moon beside the stars
that are about her, when she spreads her light o’er briny sea and eke
o’er flowery field, while the dew lies so fair on the ground and the
roses revive and the dainty anthrysc and the melilot with all its blooms”
(E. 86). Recently (1922) A. C. Benson in _The Reed of Pan_ has combined
fragment (E. 3) with the beautiful half stanza quoted above, under the
title _Moonrise_:
The moon high-hung in the hollow night
Resistless pours her silver tide;
Swift, swift the stars withdraw their light,
And their diminished glories hide.
And where cool streams through reed-beds slip,
The breeze through the orchard alley stirs,
And slumber well-nigh seems to drip
From the dark arms of dusky firs.
In another fragment, which we quote below, Sappho pictures a spring
midnight with almost astronomical exactness. She loves the sun: “I
have loved daintiness [from childhood] and for me love possesses the
brightness and beauty of the sun.” William Stebbing in his _Minstrel of
Love_ expands the two verses into ten, the last “Dazzling my brain with
gazing on the Sun.” Sappho knows the golden-sandalled and queenly dawn
(E. 19, 177). She wrote an ode to Hesperus, the Evening Star, of which
we have only the tantalizing beginning, “fairest of all the stars that
shine” (E. 32). Another graceful fragment quoted in antiquity to show
the charm of repetition (E. 149)[83] on the Evening Star, which comes in
Catullus too, has influenced not only Byron in _Don Juan_ but Andrew Lang
in _Helen of Troy_ (II. 4) and especially Tennyson (see p. 206). “That
Greek blockhead,” as Sir Walter Scott was called, though he knew more
Greek than most undergraduate students of Greek to-day, even if he didn’t
know the Sappho fragment, expresses the same idea in the _Doom of Dever
Girl_, “All meet whom day and care divide.”
Sappho is fond of birds, the dove, the lovely or heavenly swallow (E.
122), the nightingale. The doves drive Aphrodite’s car in the first ode
and in E. 16 “their heart grows light and they slacken the labor of
their pinions.” Ben Jonson took from Sappho (E. 138) his line in _The
Sad Shepherd_, “the dear good angel of the spring, The nightingale,” and
Swinburne, “The tawny sweet-winged thing Whose cry was but of spring.” A
fragment published even since Edmonds’ book speaks of the “clear-voiced
nightingales.” She knows exactly what crickets do at noon of a summer’s
day. Listen to their song (E. 94), rescued from Alcaeus, to whom Bergk
had wrongly ascribed it:
And clear song from beneath her wings doth raise
When she shouts-down the perpendicular blaze
Of the outspread sunshine of noon.
(EDMONDS)[84]
We see the woman also in her love of flowers as well as of birds. Flowers
are her favorites and she worships them with almost the modern reverence
of the Japanese, whom I have sometimes seen saying their morning prayers
to a beautiful bouquet. Take, for example, this simple but pretty
flower-picture of Sappho’s (E. 107):
I saw one day a-gathering flowers
The daintiest little maid.
(EDMONDS)
She sympathizes with the hyacinth (E. 151), which the shepherd tramples
under foot on the mountain, and uses it in one of the most attractive
flower-similes in all literature. Listen to this aubade which has
been recently found and very tentatively restored (E. 82). It gives a
delightful glimpse also of Sappho’s ménage:
‘Sappho, I swear if you come not forth I will love you no more.
O rise and shine upon us and set free your beloved strength
from the bed, and then like a pure lily beside the spring hold
aloof your Chian robe and wash you in the water. And Cleïs
shall bring down from your presses saffron smock and purple
robe; and let a mantle be put over you and be crowned with a
wreath of flowers tied about your head; and so come, sweet
with all the beauty with which you make me mad. And do you,
Praxinoa, roast us nuts, so that I may make the maidens a
sweeter breakfast; for one of the Gods, child, has vouchsafed
us a boon. This very day has Sappho the fairest of all women
vowed that she will surely return unto Mytilene the dearest of
all towns—return with us, the mother with her children.’
Dearest Atthis, can you then forget all this that happened in
the old days?... (EDMONDS)
Or take this other example of Sappho’s love of flowers which Symonds
has expanded into a sonnet too long to quote here. I give Tucker’s new
version:
Take sprigs of anise fair
With soft hands twined,
And round thy bonny hair
A chaplet bind;
The Muse with smiles will bless
Thy blossoms gay,
While from the garlandless
She turns away.
Sappho speaks of the golden pulses (E. 139):
[It was summer when I found you
In the meadow long ago,]
And the golden vetch was growing
By the shore.
(BLISS CARMAN)
Sappho knows the little and common flowers, the dainty anthrysc and
melilot, the violets and the lilies (E. 86, 83, 82), but, like Pindar,
she especially loves the rose. Meleager’s garland of song assigned the
rose to Sappho. She says in one of the new fragments (E. 83): “with many
a garland of violets and sweet roses mingled, you have decked my flowing
locks as I stood by your side, and with many a woven necklet made of a
hundred blossoms you have adorned my dainty throat.” Philostratus in his
_Letters_ (51) says: “Sappho loves the rose and always crowns it with a
meed of praise, likening beautiful maidens to it; and she compares it to
the bared fore-arms of the Graces.” Fragment E. 68 says: “Hither pure
rose-armed Graces, daughters of Zeus.” Sappho’s love of the rose has led
earlier collectors of Sappho’s fragments to include among her verses the
famous song in praise of the rose quoted by Achilles Tatius in his love
romance on _Clitophon and Leucippe_, which Elizabeth Barrett Browning has
translated:
If Zeus chose us a King of the Flowers in his mirth,
He would call to the Rose and would royally crown it,
For the Rose, ho, the Rose, is the grace of the earth,
Is the light of the plants that are growing upon it.
For the Rose, ho, the Rose, is the eye of the flowers,
Is the blush of the meadows that feel themselves fair—
Is the lightning of beauty that strikes through the bowers
On pale lovers who sit in the glow unaware.
Ho, the Rose breathes of love! Ho, the Rose lifts the cup
To the red lips of Cypris invoked for a guest!
Ho, the Rose, having curled its sweet leaves for the world,
Takes delight in the motion its petals keep up,
As they laugh to the wind as it laughs from the west!
Sappho, however, does mention the roses of Pieria in the famous lines
spoken with characteristic teacher’s tone, almost in the manner of Mrs.
Poyser. According to Plutarch, in one passage, the verses are addressed
to a wealthy woman, in another passage,[85] to a woman of no refinement
or learning; according to Stobaeus,[86] to a woman of no education;
probably it was some rich but uncultured Lesbian girl, who would not go
to the Lesbian Smith or Vassar or Bryn Mawr:
Thou shalt die and be laid low in the grave, hidden from mortal ken
Unremembered, and no song of the Muse wakens thy name again;
No Pierian rose brightens thy brow, lost in the nameless throng,
Thy dark spirit shall flit forth like a dream, bodiless ghosts among.
(SHOREY)
For another expanded version by Swinburne in his _Anactoria_ I must refer
to Wharton. Sappho had known and loved the wee wee maiden Atthis when
she was an awkward school girl, but now in the bloom of beauty after a
sad parting the fickle Atthis has flitted away to another woman’s college
and clean forgotten Sappho for a rival teacher, Andromeda; “I loved you,
Atthis, long ago, when my own girlhood was still all flowers, and you—you
seemed to me a small ungainly child” (E. 48).[87] “So you hate to think
of me, Atthis; ’Tis all Andromeda now” (Edmonds).
Lesbus was a land of flowers, of the rose and the violet, “a land rich in
corn and oil and wine, in figs and olives, in building-wood and tinted
marble,” as Tucker says. But this triangular island (about thirty-five
by twenty-five miles) had mountains rising from two to three thousand
feet at its corners and two deep fiords on its southern coast. From the
northern coast Sappho must often have looked across the short seven
miles of laughing sea upon Troyland and thought of the Homeric poems in
which Lesbus played such an important rôle.[88] The air like that of
Athens as described by Pindar, with a glamor wreathing such cities as
Smyrna, was so translucent that in the northeast across the dividing sea
many-fountained Ida could easily be seen. It is perhaps an accident that
there is so little mention of mountain or sea in Sappho. But she was no
“landlubber,” as Professor Allinson would have us believe.[89] Pindar and
the other lyric poets were acquainted with the sea and so must Sappho
have known it, as she daily saw the ships fly in and out of their haven
on white wings (cf. first stanza of poem on p. 82). In one of the new
fragments (E. 86) we have a marvellous picture of the sea in the last
stanza of a poem which otherwise, with its love of flowers, with the
beautiful simile of the rosy-fingered moon, is one of the most perfect
things in literature. The telepathic and telegraphic sympathy of Sappho
startles us and the wireless message sent by night across the severing
sea, whose sigh you can hear in the original Greek, anticipates the
modern radio.[90] As this is a memory poem, and _Anactoria_, like Hallam,
is “lost,” for the time being at least, I have followed as a model
Tennyson’s _In Memoriam_ in metre, stanza, and rhyming. The first line
seems to be “remembered” in rhyme as it were after the interval during
which the second and third lines have been made and rhymed.
SAPPHO’S GIRL FRIEND ACROSS THE SEA
Atthis, in Sardis far away
Anactoria dear to thee
And dear indeed alike to me
Now dwells, but hither often stray
Her thoughts sent usward by the power
That lives anew the life she loved
When thou her glorious goddess proved,—
Thy songs her joy at every hour.
You were her sun, now set too soon;
Among the Lydian dames she shines
As, after sunset, glow the lines
Of light the rosy-fingered moon
Throws on her retinue of stars
Spreading a far-flung lane of beams
That gleams the salt sea o’er and streams
Across the rocky shore that bars
In vain the light that floods its gloom,
And leaping landward bathes the fields
Where many a flower its beauty yields
With fragrant variegated bloom.
Full fair the dew springs forth and holds
The light, the roses lift their heads,
The dainty anthryscs quit their beds,
The clover, honey-rich, unfolds.
Through all this beauty, hard unrest
And longing crushing like a stone
Her tender heart, ofttimes atone
She wanders with a weighted breast.
She cannot calm her quivering lip
And through the balmy, scented dark
She cries aloud we must embark
And thither come on some swift ship.
Full clear her words to thee and me,
For night with all her many ears
Their ardent sound full gladly hears
And sends us o’er the severing sea.
(D. M. R.)
This ode alone marks Sappho as a great poetess. The reasons are: (1)
the loving notice of little and common flowers, (2) the comparison of
Anactoria when surrounded by other women to the moon in the midst of
her surrounding stars, the bold personification of the moon secured by
the use of the single figure “rosy-fingered,” (3) sudden and masterful
survey of land and sea, (4) the successful centering of attention upon
Anactoria’s homesickness even in the midst of such far-reaching beauty of
land and sea, (5) the remarkably forceful portrayal of what in our day we
call thought-transference as seen, for example, in Tennyson’s _Aylmer’s
Field_ or _Enoch Arden_, (6) and not least important, the simplicity and
sharpness of outline displayed in the imagery. “Night” is a vague, widely
diffused, mystic thing, but Sappho makes us see her a thing of many ears
and one of them close to Anactoria’s face. Night does not send a mystic
intimation such as Tennyson’s vibration of light might indicate. But she
speaks right out in a clear voice that carries far enough to reach across
the sea to Sappho. A seventh reason is the strange, hot emotion of love
and sorrow and longing that throbs like a pulse in every line and makes
the whole letter a living creature. Milton said and lovers of poetry
have always agreed that poetry must be simple, sensuous, and passionate.
By sensuous he of course meant expressed in images involving the use of
the bodily senses. Is there anything in poetry, ancient or modern, that
more exactly meets Milton’s requirements than these few lines of Sappho’s
letter to her girl friend? Now if this is evident to the reader of an
English translation, it is vastly more so to one who knowing the meaning
of the words has read them in the Greek and then read them again because
they were so sweet, and read them a third time and many times until the
music haunts him like the face of a lover. This will rank with Matthew
Arnold’s verses _To Marguerite_ in no. 5 of his series of little poems on
_Switzerland_:
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown
...
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!
Who order’d that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea.
Sappho’s last verse also reminds us of Horace’s _Oceano dissociabili_[91]
and Tennyson’s “bond-breaking sea.” Fragment E. 41 refers to the mariner
at sea in a storm; and E. 66 pictures a beautiful scene on the sea, where
“Hector and his comrades bring from sacred Thebe and everflowing Placia,
by ship upon the briny sea, the dainty Andromache of the glancing eye.”
(Edmonds)
Sappho’s verses are full of color, of bright and beautiful things. She
ranks with Pindar in her special devotion to gold, not for its value but
for its fine amber lustre and its permanency (E. 110). The Cyprian queen
of love sits on a throne of rich color and splendor, with inlaid wood or
metal (E. 1); she “dispenses the nectar of love in beakers of gold” in
what was perhaps the introductory poem of Sappho’s Wedding-Songs (E. 6):
Come thou, foam-born Kypris, and pour in dainty
Cups of amber gold thy delicate nectar
Subtly mixed with fire that will swiftly kindle
Love in our bosoms.
(O’HARA’S _Love’s Banquet_)
Aphrodite wears a golden coronal (E. 9), is herself golden (E. 157), and
her handmaid is golden-shining (E. 24). The Muses are golden (E. 11),
perhaps also the Nereids (E. 36). They have a golden house (E. 129):
Hither now, O Muses, leaving the golden
House of God, unseen in the azure spaces.
(O’HARA’S _Muses_)
The dawn is golden-slippered (E. 19); something or somebody is more
golden than gold (E. 60). “Gold is pure of rust” (E. 109); “Gold is
a child of Zeus; no moth nor worm devours it; and it overcomes the
strongest of mortal hearts” (E. 110).[92] Sappho’s daughter Cleïs looks
like a golden flower (E. 130); “Golden pulse grew on the shore” (E. 139,
cf. O’Hara’s poem _Golden Pulse_). One of many fragments of interest to
the student of Greek life and antiquities speaks of “gold-knuckle bowls”
(E. 191).[93] Sappho was cited by Menaechmus of Sicyon in his _Treatise
on Artists_ as the first to use a lyre called the _pectis_, and she
invented the Mixo-Lydian mode, particularly sensual or emotional, which
the Greek tragedians copied from her.
Sappho makes allusions to children which are natural and tender (E.
130). In similes she uses children simply and directly as in _The Ode to
Hesperus_ (E. 149) and in the verse, which may refer to a sparrow and
which Catullus imitated, “I flutter like a child after her mother” (E.
142).
Sappho from her tender years was inured to the sorrows as well as the
joys of love. Two of her fragments (E. 111, 135), the first perhaps a
complete poem, represent the loneliness of a long night spent in vain
waiting for a lover. Cipollini (1890) and others have often set these
to music. They are popular ballads which Sappho must have used just as
Burns did in writing _Auld Lang Syne_. As Tucker says: “It is probable
that she is setting one such prehistoric lyrical idea to new words or
recasting one such vagrom ditty.” He is thinking, I imagine, of such a
Scottish ballad as:
Yestreen I made my bed fu’ brade
The night I’ll make it narrow:
For a’ the livelong winter’s night
I’ll lie twin’d of my marrow.
There are a score of versions in Italian, some far from Sappho, and
Ronsard’s good French version; and many an American or English poet has
tried his hand at translating the lines,[94] which in the Greek toll like
a curfew bell. All too little known is the rendering by Alan Seeger,
the poet who was killed in battle on July 4, 1916, in his poem, _Do You
Remember Once?_
Under the western-seas
The pale moon settles and the Pleiades.
The firelight sinks: outside the night-winds moan—
The hour advances, and I sleep alone.
For the Greek silence of nature Seeger substitutes the sympathy of nature
in the moaning of the night winds. A more literal translation is:
Sunk is the moon
The Pleiades are set;
Tis midnight; soon
The hour is past: and yet
I lie alone—
(TUCKER)
Sappho’s verses are purer, simpler than the frank poem of Hester Bancroft
on an _August Night_:[95]
God, the night will never end
And I, alone discordant and forlorn,
Unmated, on this love-night of the year!
The other popular song about a girl in love, in a metre which Horace
imitated in the twelfth ode of the third book, is as imaginative a
description as anything in Coleridge or Keats with whom the Maryland
poet, Father Tabb, so aptly compares Sappho. It reminds one of Gretchen’s
weaving-song in _Faust_, and of the English folk-song, “O mother, put
my wheel away; I cannot spin to-night.” It is beautifully translated by
Thomas Moore, in his _Evenings in Greece_:
[As o’er her loom the Lesbian maid
In love-sick languor hung her head,
Unknowing where her fingers strayed,
She weeping turned away, and said,]
‘Oh, my sweet mother, ’tis in vain,
I cannot weave, as once I wove,
So wildered is my heart and brain
With thinking of that youth I love.’
Many fragments deal with the Greek myths. Sappho is one of the first
to tell the story of Adonis, who has his analogy in Phaon. “Woe for
Adonis” (E. 25); “Woe for him of the four months’ sojourn, Woe for
Adonis” (E. 136 uncertain restoration). Another fragment is presumed to
be Sappho’s and, probably, to be part of a song sung at the Mytilenaean
spring-festival of the marriage of Adonis and Aphrodite, of whose
counterpart at Alexandria we have an example in the fifteenth idyl of
Theocritus, so well translated by Matthew Arnold:
MAIDENS. Sweet Adonis lies a-dying, Cytherea; what’s to do?
CYTHEREA. Beat your breasts and rend your garments, maids, is my
behest to you.
(EDMONDS)
O’Hara, Bliss Carman, and many another have expanded this lament for
Adonis which we know so well from Bion’s _Lament for Adonis_ and from
Shelley’s _Adonais_. I quote the poet laureate of Canada:
What shall we do, Aphrodite?
Lovely Adonis is dying.
Ah but we mourn him!
Will he return when the Autumn
Purples the earth, and the sunlight
Sleeps in the vineyard?
Will he return when the Winter
Huddles the sheep, and Orion
Goes to his hunting?
Ah, for thy beauty, Adonis
With the soft springs and the South wind,
Love and desire!
(BLISS CARMAN)
Sappho’s knowledge of literature and legend is also not little. She is
well acquainted with Homer, who very much influenced Sappho’s language.
She knows Helen (E. 38) and her daughter Hermione (E. 44); “Hermione was
never such as you are, and just it is to liken you rather to Helen than
to a mortal maid.” Or take this complete letter to Anactoria (E. 38),
who has eloped with a soldier to Sardis, as beautiful a poem as any of
Sappho’s, if not spoiled in the last stanza by the wrong restoration of
some scholars. The news of its discovery caused Mr. Osborn to leap out
of bed and say he would fight for Sappho to the last with a pen dipt in
poison. It reminds one of _The Song of Solomon I. 9_, “I have compared
thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots,” or VI.
10, “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon,
clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?” Osborn, Mark
Telfair, Marion Mills Miller, T. E. R., and others[178] have given
poetic versions in Sapphics of this new poem. Another rendering seems
superfluous, but I could not resist the pleasure of adding it, even
though in the main less happy than its predecessors. In some of the lines
the love of far-off Sappho’s meaning has lured me astray from the nearer
English anapaest:
‘Fairest of sights on the dull black earth,’ some say,
‘Is a host of horse in battle array.’
‘A phalanx on foot,’ another will cry,
‘Or a navy full sail athwart the sky.’
‘But nay! ’Tis the lover’s beloved,’ I ween
And easy the proof and plain to be seen;
For the sum of all beauty had Helen surveyed,
Yet of him, as fairest, her choice she made,
Who all the honor of Troy’s towers destroyed.
No thought of child or parent dear alloyed
Her love. Its distant dearness led her far astray;
For ever ’tis easy to bend a woman’s way,
If only she hold lightly what is near.
See to it thou, Anactoria dear,
That, parted, we thy memory still shall share
Of her whose silent footfall’s music fair
Sounds sweeter, and whose face sheds beams more bright
Than the noisy flash of the chariot-fight,
Or tramp of footmen on their glittering way
When Lydia’s force deploys in full display.
Too well we know ’tis not for man to gain
His heart’s desire,—yet sweeter the pain,
Longing for love we once have shared,
Than forgetting how happily then we fared.
(D. M. R.)
Agamemnon is mentioned in one of the new fragments (tentatively restored
E. 85), which is an especially beautiful dialogue between Sappho and
her dumpling pupil Gongyla, which might be called _Intimations of
Immortality_:
INTIMATION OF COMING DEATH
SAPPHO
My coming death I plainly now foresee;
Long to the end of life it cannot be.
GONGYLA
How dost thou such a sad event divine?
Unto thy dear ones pray reveal the sign.
SAPPHO
In dream to me Death’s angel, Hermes, came
Within my chamber; calling me by name,
‘Come,’ said he, and he touched me with his wand.
And I, of life and strife no longer fond,
Replied: ‘I go with gladness, for I swear
By blessed Cypris that no more I care
To live, since love is passing from me. Fain
Am I to die despite my other gain
In wealth and honor. Only do I plead
To field Elysian, whither thou didst lead
Atrides Agamemnon and the flower
Of the Achaeans, take me in my hour,
And set me in that dewy vale to bloom,
Perchance again with beauty and perfume
That love invite, although with kindlier fate—
Not of ignoble souls, but of the great.’
(Adaptation by MARION MILLS MILLER)
Sappho knows the story of Leda and the egg. Edmonds (E. 97) reads a
new text: “They say that once upon a time Leda found hidden an egg of
hyacinthine hue.” But I prefer the older, better version, which O’Hara
renders:
Once on a time
They say that Leda found
Beneath the thyme
An egg upon the ground.
Sappho makes a sarcastic reference to Leto and Niobe as very dear
comrades (E. 140), and gives Niobe nine children of either sex (E. 168).
She knows the love of the Moon for Endymion in the cave on Mt. Latmus
(E. 167); she wrote about Theseus (E. 169), Prometheus (E. 170), Medea
(E. 185), and Philomela and Procne, “the heavenly swallow, Pandion’s
daughter” (E. 122). Perhaps Sappho pictured the story of Hero and Leander
(cf. p. 31). Stebbing changes the sex of Hero and makes a long poem on
_Champion, Athlete, and Harpist_:
“Hero” of Gyaros; Hellas cannot forget his name.
The lovely, gallant youth, a paragon in women’s eyes.