remains of Sappho were scientifically studied. In 1814, we have the
translations of Elton, in 1815 of Egerton, in 1833 the Sapphics by
Merivale, in 1854 Palgrave, in 1877 Walhouse. In 1869, Edwin Arnold’s
_Poets of Greece_ gave one of the best renderings of the Aphrodite
hymn in Sapphic metre and included pretty translations of nine of her
fragments. Edwin Arnold called her: “that exquisite poetess ... whose
genius among all feminine votaries of singing stands incontestably
highest.” He protests against Swinburne’s repetition of the scandal
against her sweet name which gossiping generations have invented; he
rejects the Leucadian Leap and the Phaon myth. In 1871 T. W. Higginson
wrote his important article on Sappho for _The Atlantic Monthly_, which
can now be found in his _Atlantic Essays_. He translated several of the
fragments and the hymn than which, he says, “there is not a lyrical
poem in Greek literature nor in any other which has by its artistic
structure inspired more enthusiasm.” He subjects to many a hard blow
that paltry Scot soul, Colonel Mure, whose history of Greek literature
ought to be tabooed. He repudiates the calumnies of the comedians and
scandal-mongers. His appreciation of Sappho is one of the best that has
been written.
In 1883 J. A. Symonds published his translations, and some of them
were made for and included in that charming little book of Wharton’s,
which appeared in its first edition in 1885. Even before Wharton,
Swinburne had given his high estimate of Sappho and had melted together
many of the fragments into his _Anactoria_. In 1894, Maurice Thompson
published in _The Atlantic Monthly_, “The Sapphic Secret,” and gave a
fine appreciation of Sappho with translations of the shorter fragments.
During the last thirty years the discovery of new papyri has stimulated
interest in Sappho and many books and articles, scientific and popular,
have been printed. For a discussion of the recovery of Greek literature
from papyri and the difficulties involved in deciphering and restoring
Sappho’s new fragments, I refer the reader to my introduction on the
subject in Miller-Robinson, _The Songs of Sappho_. I refer the reader
to the bibliography for some of the books and to a note[178] for
references to some popular articles, and call special attention to the
volumes of Easby-Smith, Miss Patrick, Petersen, Edmonds, Cox, Tucker,
and Edward Storer, most of whom give their own verse renderings of some,
if not all, of Sappho’s fragments. Many modern poets, both British and
American, have adapted or expanded Sappho’s fragments in English verse,
Lucy Milburn, Bliss Carman, Percy Osborn, that pure Pelasgian, John
Myers O’Hara. Recently Dr. Marion Mills Miller, formerly of Princeton
University, has published metrical adaptations of all the old and new
fragments, which are graceful and witty. He has also given the romance
of Sappho’s life in verse and has made a new poetical translation of
Ovid’s _Sappho to Phaon_. In the same volume (cf. Bibliography), I have
published the Greek text of all Sappho with a literal translation and two
introductions. One deals with the recovery and restoration of Sappho’s
relics and shows the romance as well as the difficulties involved in
deciphering and restoring her poems. The other discusses Sappho’s life
and works.
The influence of Sappho on English and American literature has been
large. We have already shown this in our citations, as it seemed better
to quote some of the great English writers when we were speaking of
Sappho herself. Addison was devoted to her, but his contemporary, Pope,
by translating Ovid’s _Sappho to Phaon_, aggravated the ill-fame which
Ovid had given her. Pope often mentions her, but without knowledge of
the true Sappho. In _Moral Essays_ (_Epistle_ III, 121) we have the line:
“Why she (Phryne) and Sappho raise that monstrous sum?”, referring to
Lady Montague and to Miss Skerrett, the latter of whom was the mistress
and later the second wife of Sir Robert Walpole. Lady Mary (Montague) is
alluded to also in _Epistle_ II, 24:
As Sappho’s diamonds with her dirty smock;
Or Sappho at her toilet’s greasy task,
With Sappho fragrant at an evening mask.
Also in the _Prologue to the Satires_, in the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_,
369, we read: “Sappho can tell you how this man was bit.” Sappho is
mentioned again in _Imitations of Horace_ (_Satire_ I, l. 83) and in
_Satires of Dr. John Donne_ (II, 6), in these words: “As who knows
Sappho, smiles at other whores.” In his letters to Cromwell, Pope often
mentions two Sapphos, one his own and the other Cromwell’s: “My service,
pray, to the other Sappho, who it is to be hoped, has not yet cast
herself headlong from any of the Leucades about London, although her
Phaon lately fled from her into Lincolnshire.” Even in the letter to
Steele, when he makes acknowledgment to the “fine fragment of Sappho,”
Pope is disingenuous and affected, as he suppresses the name of Flatman,
to whom he was really indebted.
Wordsworth, influenced probably by Welcker’s defense, had a good opinion
of Sappho (cf. the quotation, p. 247). But his dear friend, Sir Walter
Scott, seems to be ignorant of her, though the lines on the _Evening
Star_, which we have quoted (p. 64), sound strikingly Sapphic. Coleridge
seems to echo the famous fragment about the pippin on the topmost bough
in his _One Red Leaf on the Topmost Twig_; but as he shows no other
influence of Sappho this is probably an accidental resemblance. Thomas
Moore, as a translator of Anacreon with whom Sappho was generally linked,
knew Sappho well and translated some of her fragments into Latin as well
as English. His rendering of the _Weaving Song_ is especially charming
(cf. p. 79). Another contemporary Irish poet, the Reverend George Croly,
tells how:
Passion gave the living breath
That shook the chords of Sappho’s lyre.
Of the post-Revolution poets the bombastic Byron, who may have learned
something about Sappho from his friend and editor, Thomas Moore, refers
to her most. In _Don Juan_ (III, 107), he expands, none too well, into
a stanza of eight the two lines in which Sappho has painted such a
beautiful miniature landscape of reunited village life. As Livingstone
says in _The Legacy of Greece_ (p. 265): “the English genius is rich and
lavish rather than restrained. It is less in its nature to write like
Sappho.” Was Livingstone not thinking also of Swinburne and many another
modern poet who plays so many indistinct, un-Greek variations on that
divine line: “I loved thee once, Atthis, in the long ago,” which Mackail
has called “just one sliding sigh and whisper of sound.” There is another
expansion by the poet laureate of Canada, which we have quoted in a note
(p. 257). It is Byron who in _Don Juan_ (III, 76) speaks of
The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece!
Where burning Sappho loved and sung;
and in _Don Juan_ (II) he speaks of “Sappho, the sage bluestocking in
whose grave All those may leap who rather would be neuter.” In the
controversy between Byron and Boules with regard to the second ode, Byron
says: “Is not this sublime and fierce love for one of her own sex? And
is not Philips’ translation of it in the mouths of all your women? And
are the English schools or the English women the more corrupt for all
this?” Byron echoes the element of fire which has so often been noted in
Sappho’s songs, by critics from Plutarch to Sara Teasdale. He knows the
story derived from Ovid and Maximus of Tyre that she was dark (p. 35) and
also the legend of the Lover’s Leap (_Childe Harold_, II, 39-41):
Childe Harold sail’d, and pass’d the barren spot,
Where sad Penelope o’erlook’d the wave;
And onward view’d the mount, not yet forgot,
The lover’s refuge, and the Lesbian’s grave.
Dark Sappho! could not verse immortal save
That breast imbued with such immortal fire?
Childe Harold hail’d Leucadia’s cape afar;
...
But when he saw the evening star above
Leucadia’s far-projecting rock of woe,
And hail’d the last resort of fruitless love,
He felt, or deem’d he felt, no common glow.
While Shelley and Keats do not have clear echoes of Sappho, they come
nearer to her in spirit than any other modern poets; but, even so,
Keats’ sensuousness removes him from Sappho. W. L. Courtney, in a very
interesting article on _Sappho and Aspasia_,[178] says: “Shelley has
the true lyrical note, and Keats some of that chiselled loveliness which
makes each Sapphic stanza a masterpiece.” One might even suspect that
Shelley knew the second ode, at least in some secondary source, when he
composed _To Constantia Singing_.
Women poets naturally have taken an interest in Sappho. Mrs. Hemans, the
English lyrist (1793-1835), speaks of “Sappho’s fervent heart.” Elizabeth
Barrett Browning seems to have known only the song of the rose to which
we have referred above (p. 68). She is familiar with the Lover’s Leap
legend, as was Byron, for she speaks in _A Vision of Poets_ of
—Sappho, with that gloriole
Of ebon hair on calmèd brows—
O poet-woman! none foregoes
The leap, attaining the repose.
In Matthew Arnold there is much classical influence, but _A Modern
Sappho_ has nothing of ancient Sappho. Walter Savage Landor,[179] who
looked back to Greece from Rome and by his delightful dialogues made the
ancient ages live again, is one of the few who decry Sappho. He seems
to be jealous when he says that “Sappho is not the only poetess who has
poured forth her melodies to Hesperus, or who had reason to thank him.”
He composes ten verses himself entitled _Sappho to Hesperus_, which
are not like Sappho’s at all. Likewise he takes eight lines to express
the thought of the despair of the love-sick maiden over her faithless
lover, which Sappho depicts in a better picture of a single couplet.
Landor finds Sappho deficient in delicacy in her answer to Alcaeus
and attributes to her an epigram about Alcaeus which she never wrote.
He would obliterate no letter of the invocation to Hesperus by a tear
of his. Among the poems of Sappho he finds one written in a different
hand from the rest, which pleases him as much as any of them, but it
reads like Landor and is inferior to what Sappho would have said. In
_Simonidea_ he tries his hand at the _Weaving Song_:
Mother I cannot mind my wheel
My fingers ache, my lips are dry,
Oh if you felt the pain I feel!
But oh, who ever felt as I?
Charles Kingsley wrote a beautiful poem on Sappho, which well represents
her mood; but there is hardly even a faint echo of Sappho’s own
fragments unless the words “all her veins ran fever” are accidentally
suggested by the second ode.
SAPPHO
She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
Above her glared the noon; beneath, the sea,
Upon the white horizon Atho’s peak
Weltered in burning haze; all airs were dead;
The cicale slept among the tamarisk’s hair;
The birds sat dumb and drooping. Far below
The lazy sea-weed glistened in the sun;
The lazy sea-fowl dried their steaming wings;
The lazy swell crept whispering up the ledge,
And sank again. Great Pan was laid to rest;
And Mother Earth watched by him as he slept,
And hushed her myriad children for a while.
She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;
And sighed for sleep, for sleep that would not hear,
But left her tossing still; for night and day
A mighty hunger yearned within her heart,
Till all her veins ran fever; and her cheek,
Her long thin hands, and ivory-channelled feet,
Were wasted with the wasting of her soul.
Then peevishly she flung her on her face,
And hid her eyeballs from the blinding glare,
And fingered at the grass, and tried to cool
Her crisp hot lips against the crisp hot sward:
And then she raised her head, and upward cast
Wild looks from homeless eyes, whose liquid light
Gleamed out between deep folds of blue-black hair,
As gleam twin lakes between the purple peaks
Of deep Parnassus, at the mournful moon.
Beside her lay her lyre. She snatched the shell,
And waked wild music from its silver strings;
Then tossed it sadly by.—‘Ah, hush!’ she cries,
‘Dead offspring of the tortoise and the mine!
Why mock my discords with thine harmonies?
Although a thrice-Olympian lot be thine,
Only to echo back in every tone
The moods of nobler natures than thine own.’
(CHARLES KINGSLEY)
William Cory, famous translator of the Heraclitus epigram, who published
poems on Stesichorus and other classical subjects, prettily transformed
one of the fragments into:
Woman dead, lie there;
No record of thee
Shall there ever be,
Since thou dost not share
Roses in Pieria grown.
In the deathful cave,
With the feeble troop
Of the folk that droop,
Lurk and flit and crave,
Woman severed and far-flown.
William Morris, a fine classical scholar, as shown in his _Life and
Death of Jason_, in _The Earthly Paradise_ (1868-1871), expands in a
very readable form the story of the Egyptian courtesan, Rhodopis, whom
Sappho’s brother, Charaxus, ransomed. About the same time (1870) Rossetti
made the combination of two fragments which we have mentioned above (p.
93). Some tell us that Oscar Wilde’s heart goes out to Sappho, but so
far as I have read I have not been able to find in him any trace of the
real Sappho.[178a] On the other hand, Tennyson and Swinburne read her
fragments over and over. Tennyson, who thought the Sapphics of Horace
to be “much inferior to those of Sappho,” beautifully paraphrases the
second ode in _Eleänore_ (1832). In the original edition of _Fatima_
(Dec. 1832), published under the title _O Love, Love, Love_, he prefixed
the first line of this ode as a motto. Many as are the echoes of the
sweet-bitter, bitter-sweet antithesis of Sappho (E. 81, above, p. 57)
in Wharton and other critics, it seems strange that perhaps the most
beautiful and deep-hearted of all, Elaine’s song in Tennyson’s Idyl is
never cited, so far as I know.[180]
Love, art thou sweet? then bitter death must be:
Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me.
O Love, if death be sweeter, let me die.
Tennyson echoes the third fragment, as we have seen (p. 63); and he
re-echoes through Horace another fragment in his _Epilogue_ (p. 36).
In _Fatima_, “Love, O withering might” suggests another fragment. In
_Leonine Elegiacs_ we have a better adaptation than in Byron of the
Hesperus hymn:
The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth,
Smoothing the wearied mind: bring me my love, Rosalind.
In _Locksley Hall Sixty Years After_ he again uses the same Sapphic
fragment: “Hesper, whom the poet call’d the Bringer home of all good
things.” His brother, Frederick Tennyson, who was such a good Greek
scholar that he won the medal at Trinity College for a Greek poem, in
his _Isles of Greece_ (1890) used several adaptations and translations
of Sappho, the prettiest being those about Sappho’s child Cleïs, about
Hesper and the summer noonday siesta by the cool waters. Many writers of
lyrics in England and Scotland have thought of Sappho, but generally of
the Phaon story, as recently did Thomas McKie in his _Lyric on Love_:[181]
Bewildered with her love and grief,
From lone Leucadia’s stormy steep
Distracted Sappho sought relief,
By plunging in the whelming deep.
The deep that closed upon her woes
Not half so wild, impetuous flows.
Swinburne is one of Sappho’s greatest admirers, and we have quoted some
of his praises among the appreciations of Sappho (p. 11). We have cited
Noyes’ appreciation of Swinburne’s love of Sappho, and here are Thomas
Hardy’s interesting lines to Swinburne:
—His singing-mistress verily was no other
Than she the Lesbian, she the music-mother
Of all the tribe that feel in melodies;
Who leapt, love-anguished, from the Leucadian steep
Into the rambling world-encircling deep
Which hides her where none sees.
And one can hold in thought that nightly here
His phantom may draw down to the water’s brim,
And hers come up to meet it, as a dim
Lone shine upon the heaving hydrosphere,
And mariners wonder as they traverse near,
Unknowing of her and him.
One dreams him sighing to her spectral form:
“O teacher, where lies hid thy burning line;
Where are those songs, O poetess divine
Whose very arts are love incarnadine?”
And her smile back: “Disciple true and warm,
Sufficient now are thine.” ...
(THOMAS HARDY, _A Singer Asleep_)
While perhaps Swinburne exaggerates in his praise of Sappho, he owes much
to the great poetess of love:
Love’s priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,
Song’s priestess, mad with joy and pain of love.
(_On the Cliffs_)
He makes her say:
My blood was hot wan wine of love,
And my song’s sound the sound thereof,
The sound of the delight of it.
In _Tristram of Lyonesse_ he speaks of “Sweet Love, that art so bitter,”
and in _Anactoria_:
My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes
Blind me, thy tresses burn me ...
His poems have many Sapphic echoes. In his youth he poured several of
Sappho’s fragments into the melting pot of _Anactoria_, where she is a
nerve-racked woman, torn by passion, sensuous and lascivious, altogether
too “Sapphic.” The rhetoric in his lines is gorgeous, but he loses much
of Sappho’s emotional power. “That one low, pellucid phrase,” as Mackail
calls the line, “I say that one will think of us even hereafter,” is
expanded into:
Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine
Except these kisses of my lips on thine
Brand them with immortality; but me—
Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea,
Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold
Cast forth of heaven with feet of awful gold
And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind,
Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind
Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown—
But in the light and laughter, in the moan
And music, and in grasp of lip and hand
And shudder of water that makes felt on land
The immeasurable tremor of all the sea,
Memories shall mix and metaphors of me.
The famous fragment of four lines which we have quoted above (p. 69)
becomes:
Thee too the years shall cover; thou shalt be
As the rose born of one same blood with thee,
As a song sung, as a word said, and fall
Flower-wise, and be not any more at all,
Nor any memory of thee anywhere;
For never Muse has bound above thine hair
The high Pierian flower whose graft outgrows
All Summer kinship of the mortal rose
And colour of deciduous days, nor shed
Reflex and flush of heaven above thine head, etc.
The Aphrodite hymn which he paraphrased in _Anactoria_ is used again in
_Songs of the Spring-tides_:
O thou of divers-coloured mind, O thou
Deathless, God’s daughter subtle-souled
...
Child of God, close craftswoman, I beseech thee;
Bid not ache nor agony break nor master,
Lady, my spirit.
(_On the Cliffs_)
In the same poem the mature Swinburne comes closer than in his youth to
Sappho, when he says: “The tawny sweet-winged thing, Whose cry was but of
spring.” But even in this poem he dilutes Sappho’s one line into six or
more:
‘I loved thee’—hark, one tenderer note than all—
‘Atthis, of old time once’—one low long fall,
Sighing—one long low lovely loveless call,
Dying—one pause in song so flamelike fast—
‘Atthis, long since in old time overpast’—
One soft first pause and last.
We cannot take leave of Swinburne without paying tribute to his Sapphics.
English and American poets in general have not been successful with the
Sapphic strophe, though in modern times Canning’s _Needy Knife-grinder_
is a good specimen; and Tennyson caught the real Greek cadence in his
specimen:
Faded every violet, all the roses;
Gone the glorious promise, and the victim
Broken in this anger of Aphrodite
Yields to the victor.
Many have experimented with the Sapphic stanza, as recently Clinton
Scollard and Thomas S. Jones, Jr., in their _Sapphics_.
TO A HILL-TOWN
(Last two stanzas)
Sighing winds and crooning of gentle waters;
Ilex boughs that tremble with tender music,—
Nightingales that sing in the scented gloaming,—
These for thee, Sappho!
Immortelles and chaplets of crimson roses,—
Roses loved of thee and beloved of Lesbos,—
Plaintive notes of lyres and the tears of lovers,
These for thee, Sappho!
(T. S. J.)
TO THE LESBIAN
You, who first unloosed from the winds their burden
On that lyre of magical trembling heart-strings,
Merged within all sorrow and human gladness—
So sang for all time:
Do you never still through the drifting shadows
Seek unseen the ways that you loved in Lesbos,—
Or alone for song’s everlasting splendor
Were you made mortal?
(T. S. J.)
Sara Teasdale (Mrs. Filsinger), who has been called one of the best of
contemporary lyric poets and who is an ardent admirer of Sappho, has
written the following striking lyric in the Sapphic stanza:
THE LAMP
If I can bear your love like a lamp before me,
When I go down the long steep Road of Darkness,
I shall not fear the everlasting shadows,
Nor cry in terror.
If I can find out God, then I shall find Him;
If none can find Him, then I shall sleep soundly,
Knowing how well on earth your love sufficed me,
A lamp in darkness.
Marion Mills Miller[182] has written some good Sapphics, though his
theory of the proper rendition of Sapphic metre will cause some
controversy among scholars. We have not the space here to discuss the
history of the Sapphic metre, which if not first used by Sappho was
first perfected by her. It has been employed extensively in all ages.
Horace has it some twenty-six times. Elizabethan renderings can be found
in Robinson Ellis’ preface to his translation of Catullus. By Rhabanus
(766-856) it was fitted to hymns such as those for the _Feast of St.
John the Baptist_, for Candlemas, Michaelmas, and for the Feast of St.
Benedict, and it was employed for his hymns in the _Common of Confessors_
and the _Common of Virgins_. But no one else has ever caught the
Sapphic rhythm and melody so well as Swinburne in his early poem called
_Sapphics_:
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.
...
Saw the reluctant
Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,
Looking always, looking with necks reverted,
Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder
Shone Mitylene;
...
Ah the singing, ah the delight, the passion!
All the Loves wept, listening; sick with anguish,
Stood the crowned nine Muses about Apollo;
Fear was upon them,
While the tenth sang wonderful things they knew not.
Ah the tenth, the Lesbian! the nine were silent,
None endured the sound of her song for weeping;
Laurel by laurel.
Faded all their crowns; but about her forehead,
Round her woven tresses and ashen temples
White as dead snow, paler than grass in summer,
Ravaged with kisses,
Shone a light of fire as a crown for ever.
Yea, almost the implacable Aphrodite
Paused, and almost wept; such a song was that song,
Yea, by her name too
Called her, saying, ‘Turn to me, O my Sappho;’
Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not
Tears for laughter darken immortal eyelids,
Heard not about her
...
Clothed about with flame and with tears, and singing
Songs that move the heart of the shaken heaven,
Songs that break the heart of the earth with pity,
Hearing, to hear them.
AMERICAN. In America in early days little attention was paid to the
content of Sappho, but the Phaon story is sometimes used, as for example
by Philip Freneau of New Jersey, the “poet of the American Revolution,”
the “creature of the opposition” (1752-1832). In _The Monument of Phaon_,
a poem published in 1795, in the form of a dialogue between Sappho and
the traveller, Ismenius informs her that he saw the tomb of her deserter,
Phaon, in Sicily, erected by another lady:
Not distant far a monument arose
Among the trees, and form’d of Parian stone,
...
A sculptured Venus on the summit wept,
A pensive Cupid dropt the parting tear.
The last lines are:
I’ll go! and from the high Leucadian steep
Take my last farewell in the lover’s leap,
I charge thee Phaon, by this deed of woe,
To meet me in the Elysian shades below,
No rival beauty shall pretend a share,
Sappho alone shall walk with Phaon there.
She spoke, and downward from the mountain’s height
Plung’d in the plashy wave to everlasting night.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in the index to the first volume of the
_Southern Literary Messenger_ states that a stanza of Sappho’s second ode
is embodied in his poem, _To Sarah_:
In such an hour when are forgot
The World, its cares and my own lot
Thou seemest then to be
A gentle guarding spirit given
To guide my wandering thoughts to heaven
If they should stray from thee.
In _Ulalume_ there is a possible echo of fragment (E. 16):