Wings till they trailed in the dust,
In agony sobbed, letting sink her
Plumes till they trailed in the dust.
In _Al Aaraaf_, I, 43 ff., Poe says in a note that he is referring to
Sappho in the lines:
... lilies such as rear’d the head
On the fair Capo Deucato, and sprang
So eagerly around about to hang
Upon the flying footsteps—deep pride—
Of her who lov’d a mortal—and so died.
Dr. Thomas O. Mabbott of Columbia University has called my attention to
the fact that Poe published a version of Sappho’s second ode by Mary E.
Hewitt in _Broadway Journal_, I, no. 24 (1845); that he knew “Udoch’s”
note (_Southern Literary Messenger_, I, p. 454, April, 1835) where there
is a reference to the _Spectator_, no. 229; and that the paper, _Some
Ancient Greek Authors_, signed P. in the _Southern Literary Messenger_
for April, 1836, where a conventional account of Sappho is given, was
probably written by Poe.
Later American literature, like that of other countries, is full of
the name of Sappho, even if it does not show a profound knowledge of
the fragments of the actual Sappho. In any case, such dramas and poems
and novels reveal the tremendous potentiality of her name. We have
referred to translations or adaptations by Easby-Smith, Lucy Milburn,
J. M. O’Hara, Bliss Carman, Petersen, Storer, and Marion Mills Miller.
There have been renderings of individual poems by Felton, Higginson,
Gildersleeve, Shorey, Lawton, Appleton, Whicher, Horton, Drake, and
others; the first ode has been well rendered in the metre of the original
by Professor Appleton, Professor Fairclough, and others (cf. pp. 47-52
above).[73] We cannot list here all the American renderings of single
songs or fragments, although we have incidentally in this book mentioned
many such, and an abundance of references will be found in the notes.
Nor can we give the titles of all the tragedies and poems which have
been inspired by the name of Sappho. We select only a few of the more
important. There is an interesting tragedy in five acts called _Sappho
of Lesbos_ by Mrs. Estelle Lewis (“Stella”), whom Edgar Allan Poe called
“the rival of Sappho.” The play was put on the stage in London in 1868
and afterwards was given on the Athenian stage in a modern Greek version.
It reached a seventh edition. It should be credited to America, since
Mrs. Lewis was Miss Anna Blanche Robinson, born near Baltimore in 1824.
She translated Virgil’s _Aeneid_ when a mere schoolgirl, and afterwards
married Mr. Lewis of Brooklyn, New York. She travelled much abroad, but
returned to America, where she wrote some of the plays before she went
to live in London in 1865. In 1876 was published Ellen Frothingham’s
translation of Grillparzer’s _Sappho_. In 1900-1913 H. V. Sutherland
wrote his _Sappho and Phaon_, and in 1907 was published Percy Mackaye’s
tragedy with the same title. Even when he was a student at Harvard, he
wrote an entirely distinct lyric drama in verse, entitled _Sappho, or
Archilochus and Hipponax_, in which he himself acted with a gathering of
Harvard and Wellesley students in January, 1896. Unfortunately this drama
has not been published. The published play is written mostly in iambic
pentameter blank verse, with a few lyrics and some trochaic and dactylic
lines; there are also several excellent Sapphics. It has never been very
successful on the stage, although the music given with it is still so
popular that it has been recently published by Professor Stanley (cf.
bibliography). In the prologue a manuscript of Sappho’s poems is imagined
to have been found in excavating the theatre of Varius at Herculaneum,
just as Lucy Milburn, who lived in Lesbos for a while, pretended that she
procured her poems from papyri which she had discovered in a metal case
in the Orient. The scene of the tragedy is an olive grove on a promontory
overlooking the Aegean Sea. In the first act we have Atthis betrothed to
Larichus, and Anactoria deserted by Alcaeus for Sappho. Pittacus is one
of Sappho’s suitors who quarrels with Alcaeus and in trying to strike
him hits the slave Phaon. In the second act Sappho releases Phaon from
his yoke and they flee from Alcaeus after Phaon has struck him with his
spear. In the third act Phaon again strikes at Alcaeus, but this time
hits his own boy. Thalassa, his wife, shows him his own dead child and so
he returns to her, and the rejected Sappho springs into the misty sea.
There are inappropriate prose interludes with a pantomime of the drunken
Hercules. Sappho is here again not the real Sappho but the Sappho of
tradition, which is rather strange, as several of Sappho’s fragments, by
no means all that might have been suitable, are accurately and charmingly
paraphrased. This shows that Mackaye knew the fragments of Sappho, but
he has no real understanding of Sappho herself, for his Sappho is given
to unrestrained love and she rejects a great poet and statesman for the
married slave into whom Mackaye has transformed Phaon. I can quote only
the very dramatic hymn to Poseidon and Aphrodite:
God of the generations, pain, and death,
I bow to thee. Not for love’s sake is love’s
Fierce happiness, but for the after-race.
Yet, thou eternal Watcher of the tides,
Knowing their passions, tell me! Why must we
Rapturous beings of the spray and storm
That, chanting, beat our hearts against thy shores
Of aspiration—ebb? ebb and return
Into the songless deep? are we no more
Than foam upon thy garment?
Another wave has broken at your feet
And, moaning, wanes into oblivion.
But not its radiance. That flashes back
Into the morning, and shall flame again
Over a myriad waves. That flame am I,
Nor thou, Poseidon, shalt extinguish me.
My spirit is thy changeling, and returns
To her, who glows beyond the stars of birth—
To her, who is herself time’s passion star.
Many individual American poems have also taken the title or themes from
Sappho. Oliver Wendell Holmes refers to her in the fourth stanza of _The
Voiceless_:
Not where Leucadian breezes sweep
O’er Sappho’s memory-haunted billow,
But where the glistening night-dews weep
On nameless sorrow’s churchyard pillow.
(_The Atlantic Monthly_, Oct. 1858)
Samuel Latham Mitchill (1764-1831) reflects Sappho’s love of the rose in
an imaginary dialogue between Sappho and her younger contemporary from
Samos, Pythagoras:
PYTHAGORAS AND SAPPHO, _or_ THE DIAMOND AND THE ROSE
Long time ago, ’tis well expressed,
Pythagoras the seer
This question artfully addressed
To beauteous Sappho’s ear:
“When hence thou shalt be forced to flee,
By transmigration’s power,
Wouldst thou indeed prefer to be
A jewel or a flower?”
The Lesbian maid these words returned
To greet the Samian sage,
“For gems my taste has never burned,
And flowers my choice engage.
“The glittering stones, though rich and rare,
No animation know,
While vegetables fine and fair
With vital action glow.
“The senseless gem no pleasure moves,
Displayed in fashion’s use,
But flowers enjoy their gentle loves,
And progeny produce.
“Then when I shall surmount,” she cried,
“Rude dissolution’s storm,
Oh! let me not be petrified,
But wear a living form.
“Those matchless rays the diamond shows,
With promptness I decline,
That I may dwell within the rose
And make its blossoms mine.”
In recent years many poems have appeared on Sappho. For example, thinking
perhaps of the story that Solon asked his nephew to teach him a song of
Sappho before he died, and echoing the epithet of “sweetly smiling” in
Alcaeus’ fragment, Richard Hovey (1864-1900) wrote in _The Independent_,
April 30, 1896, _A Dream of Sappho_:
I dreamed of Sappho on a summer night,
Her nightingales were singing in the trees
Beside the castled river; and the wind
Fell like a woman’s fingers on my cheek,
And then I slept and dreamed and marked no change;
The night went on with me into my dream,
This only I remember, that I said:
‘O Sappho! ere I leave this paradise,
Sing me one song of those lost books of yours
For which we poets still go sorrowing;
That when I meet my fellows on the earth
I may rejoice them more than many pearls;’
And she, the sweetly-smiling, answered me,
As one who dreams: ‘I have forgotten them!’
We have referred above to Gamaliel Bradford’s use of Sappho’s apple
on the topmost bough; and Maurice Thompson, the author of _Alice of
Old Vincennes_ and the _Sapphic Secret_, published as his last song,
_Sappho’s Apple_ in _The Independent_, Feb. 21, 1901:
SAPPHO’S APPLE
A dreamy languor lapsed along,
And stirred the dusky-bannered boughs;
With half a sigh and half a song
The crooning tree did nod and drowse,
While far aloft blush-tinted hung
One perfect apple maiden-sweet,
At which the gatherers vainly flung,
And could not get to hoard or eat.
“Reddest and best,” they growled and went
Slowly away, each with his load
Fragrant upon his shoulders bent,
The hill-flowers darkening where they trode;
“Reddest and best; but not for us;
Some loafing lout will see it fall;
The laborer’s prize—’twas ever thus—
Is his who never works at all!”
Soon came a vagrant, loitering,
His young face browned by wind and sun,
Weary, yet blithe and prone to sing,
Tramping his way to Avalon;
Even I it was, who, long athirst
And hungry, saw the apple shine;
Then wondrous wild sweet singing burst
Flame-like across these lips of mine.
“O, ruby-flushed and flaring gold,
Thou splendid lone one left for me,
Apple of love to filch and hold,
Fruit-glory of a kingly tree!
Drop, drop into my hand,
That I may hide thee in my breast,
And bear thee far o’er sea and land,
A captive, to the purple West.”
Renée Vivien (1877-1909), an American poetess of great promise who
died all too young and all too unknown to students of Sappho (see
bibliography), made some very nice French verse translations of Sappho
which were published under a pseudonym in 1903 and reprinted anonymously
in 1909. She pays her tribute to Sappho in these two verses:
Les siècles attentifs se penchent pour entendre
Les lambeaux de tes chants....
The Maryland poet, Father John B. Tabb, the only American who with
Emerson was admitted to the Oxford _Garland Series on Epigrams_, has two
poems on Sappho, in the first of which Keats is appropriately classed
with Sappho:[183]
KEATS—SAPPHO
Methinks, when first the nightingale
Was mated to thy deathless song,
That Sappho with emotion pale,
Amid the Olympian throng,
Again, as in the Lesbian grove,
Stood listening with lips apart,
To hear in thy melodious love
The pantings of her heart.
SAPPHO
A light upon the headland, flaming far,
We see thee o’er the widening waves of time,
Impassioned as a palpitating star,
Big with prophetic destiny sublime:
A momentary flash—a burst of song—
Then silence, and a withering blank of pain.
We wait, alas! in tedious vigils long,
The meteor-gleam that cometh not again!
Our eyes are heavy, and our visage wan:
Our breath—a phantom of the darkness—glides
Ghostlike to swell the dismal caravan
Of shadows, where thy lingering splendor hides,
Till, with our tears and ineffectual sighs,
We quench the spark a smouldering hope supplies.
We have already referred to Alan Seeger’s use of the famous midnight
fragment (p. 78). The magazines are fond of the subject of Sappho and
Phaon and have countless poems which refer to Phaon and the Leucadian
Leap. Buchanan has a poem called _The Leucadian Rock_; and Edward J.
O’Brien in the _Liberator_ says:
Stir not the grasses here,
O wandering zephyr,
For Phaon travelled far over alien foam
Before his footsteps turned in soft contentment
Home to the green threshold
He had forgotten.
Sara Teasdale, the modern burning American Sappho, has a poem on _Phaon
and the Leucadian Leap_ in _Scribner’s Magazine_, for December, 1913, pp.
725-6. The poem is too long to quote entire, and I can give only a few
lines:
Farewell; across the threshold many feet
Shall pass, but never Sappho’s feet again.
...
‘Whither goes Sappho lonely in the night?’
Whither goes Sappho? Whither all men go,
But they go driven, straining back with fear,
And Sappho goes as lightly as a leaf
Blown from brown autumn forests to the sea.
...
Yet they shall say: ‘It was for Cercolas—
She died because she could not bear her love.’
...
Others shall say: ‘Grave Dica wrought her death.’
...
Ah, Dica, it is not for thee I go.
And not for Phaon, tho’ his ship lifts sail
Here in the windless harbor, for the south.
...
How should they know that Sappho lived and died
Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover,
...
The gods have given life, I gave them song;
The debt is paid and now I turn to go.
Alfred Noyes, in his poem _In Memory of Swinburne_ uses the fragment
which Swinburne himself expanded (cf. p. 12). Edwin Arlington
Robinson[184] has translated _The Dust of Timas_ (cf. p. 100), which
has recently been diluted by William Stebbing into twelve verses in his
poem, _A Bride in Death_. Robinson’s rendering of Posidippus’ epigram on
Doricha is also excellent:
So now the very bones of you are gone
Where they were dust and ashes long ago;
And there was the last ribbon you tied on
To bind your hair, and that is dust also;
And somewhere there is dust that was of old
A soft and scented garment that you wore—
The same that once till dawn did closely fold
You in with fair Charaxus, fair no more.
But Sappho, and the white leaves of her song,
Will make your name a word for all to learn,
And all to love thereafter, even while
It’s but a name; and this will be as long
As there are distant ships that will return
Again to your Naucratis and the Nile.
There is little of Sappho except in name in Agnes Kendrick Gray’s
verses[185] or in those of William Alexander Percy.[186] Harry Kemp is
thinking of Byron rather than Sappho herself when he says that the lines,
“the Isles of Greece where burning Sappho loved and sung,” went to his
soul like a white hot iron. There is more in George Horton,[187] who in
the last poem on Sappho which I have seen from his pen has a refrain on
“bitter-sweet.” Mr. Horton forgets that we do know that Pittacus, (see
illustration Pl. 2) was “lord of Lesbos’ isle,” but the general sentiment
is true all the same:
BALLADE OF SAPPHO’S FAME
Oh, who was lord of Lesbos’ isle
When Sappho sang for many a year,
And great Apollo’s self the while,
Ceased from the lyre and bent to hear?
The titles to his heart so near,
His lineage, who can now repeat?
Yet she escaped oblivion drear
Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.”
And who by wealth or selfish guile
became the island’s proudest peer?
What siren with voluptuous wile
Was potent at the royal ear?
Who gained renown with sword and spear?
Their fame is dust beneath the feet
Of Time, and she alone is dear
Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.”
Our joy is sadder than the smile
Of grief that cannot shed a tear;
Our lives are like a little mile
Marked on the orbit of a sphere;
The wisdom that we most revere
Is mixed with folly and defeat:
Her laurel never can grow sere
Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.”
ENVOI
From out that pallid atmosphere
Where dawn and darkness vaguely meet,
Comes but her lark-note cool and clear
Who said that love is “bitter-sweet.”
I have quoted enough to discredit “The King of the Black Isles” who in
the _Line O’Type_ of the _Chicago Tribune_ for November, 1922, publishes
a poem with the alliterative caption, _A Lady Lived in Lesbos_.[188] The
last of the three stanzas is:
We have forgotten beauty and all our goods are good,
And little we remember now the dryads and the wood,
And only old philosophers and foolish dreamers know
What lady lived in Lesbos a weary time ago.
Even as this book goes to press, Tristram Tupper issues his novel,
_Adventuring_ (Doran Co., N. Y., 1923), in which Sappho is discovered
even down in the valley of the Shenandoah:
“On such a night Jay Singleton discovered the most beloved
singer of all the ages. Not in the Lesbian starlit dusk, nor
yet in the golden-sandaled dawn, but beneath a smoky lamp in
the valley of the Shenandoah. Found her in a book. And he
liked the cut of her verses—three pentameters followed by a
dipody; and he liked the cut of her clothes—sort of loose and
careless before the Christian era. ‘No use falling in love,’
said Jay Singleton to himself. ‘She sang her songs six hundred
years B.C.’
“But he pored over another fragment, translated another
quatrain, looked up each word, strung them together, made a
kind of rime. In a word, Jay Singleton tried to improve a bit
on the inimitable Sappho. And that night out on his porch where
no one could hear, not even at the post office quarter of a
mile away, he struck the strings of his guitar and he sang this
surprising Sapphic:
Man is peer of gods in those moments after
Love has silenced song and has banished laughter;
Then—to her who smiles at him softly through tears—
He has no peers.
“He laid aside his guitar and lit his pipe, that made a pink
glow in the darkness. He tried to form in his mind an image of
Sappho and of her Isle of Lesbos, tried to wander back through
the labyrinthine ages, ages misty with music, dusky with gold,
red with wars, and blushing with roses—forgotten wars, faded
roses mingling to form the perfume of the centuries. He pulled
on his pipe. ‘Where is she now?’ Easy enough to imagine Sappho
with her ivory throat, her violet eyes and sandals of golden
dawn, back in the golden dawn of poetry. For, overhead, these
were her stars. But he wondered about the form her singing soul
had taken after she had leaped into the Ionian Sea. Had the
waters quenched the spark, or was her soul immortal—a flame
that twenty-five hundred years had failed to extinguish? Again
he asked: ‘Where are you now? Where in this, the most cluttered
up of all the ages?’ He tried to imagine her beside the Little
Calfpasture—Sappho beside the Calfpasture Creek, sighing,
laughing, singing her lyrics! ‘No use falling in love! Sang
your songs twenty-five hundred years ago!’”
In May, 1922, Miss Bertha Bennett of Carleton College produced
an interesting pageant “A Grecian Festival” on the Sappho and
Phaon story, with adaptations of Sappho’s first two odes and
representing Sappho as leaping into Lyman lake. It ends with
the union of Sappho and Phaon, after death, on Mt. Olympus.
AN ADDENDUM ON SAPPHO IN RUSSIAN
Many Russian writers mention Sappho, especially Vyacheslav Ivanov; and in
a volume republished in Berlin, 1923, (_Zovy Drevnosti_, _Echoes of the
Past_) Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont has translated eight of Sappho’s
fragments. The same poet (_Zacharovanny Grot_, _The Enchanted Grotto_,
vol. III, 1908) has published a poem on Sappho which my former student,
now of Columbia University, Dr. Clarence Manning, has translated in the
original metre:
O Sappho, thou dost know alone
How hard the poet strives revealing
The secrets beauty once has shown
In moments of immortal feeling.
O Sappho, thou dost know alone—
Thy name a perfume’s sweetness holy—
The dreams that we one day have known
But lost unspoken, faded wholly.
O Sappho, thou dost know alone
How clearly in uncounted masses
Still unreached flowers yet are grown
Where life through the charmed grotto passes.
XII. SAPPHO’S INFLUENCE ON MUSIC
On the operatic stage Sappho has had much influence; and above I have
told how Lamartine said that Sappho was a superb subject for an opera,
although he never wrote the opera, and how Grillparzer was asked to
write an opera on Sappho. In French we have a lyrical tragedy, _Sapho_,
by Empis and Courniol (1818), Delavault’s _Sapho_ and Gounod’s _Sapho_
(1851); and a few years ago (1897) Massenet produced his _Sapho_. In
Italian there is Pacini’s _Saffo_ (Naples 1840); in Dutch, Bree’s
_Sapho_; in German, Schwartzendorf’s _Sappho_ and Kanne’s _Sappho_; in
Bohemian, there is Reicha’s _Sappho_; and in Russian, Lissenko’s _Sappho_.
Brahms composed a _Sapphic Ode_, which is very familiar because it is
often sung to-day and there is an English victrola record of it by Julia
Clausen, but while it deals with Sappho’s favorite flower, the rose, it
is Sapphic only in name and metre:
Rosen brach ich nachts mir am dunklen Hage.
Süsser hauchten Duft sie, als je am Tage;
Doch verstreuten reich die bewegten Aeste
Thau, der mich nässte.
Auch der Küsse Duft mich wie nie berückte,
Die ich nachts von Strauch deiner Lippen pflückte;
Doch auch dir bewegt ein Gemüth gleich jenen,
Thauten die Thränen.
(Words by HANS SCHMIDT)
From the time of the _Schemata Musica_ printed in Volger’s edition
of 1810, down to the music published by G. Cipollini in 1890 in his
brother’s _Saffo_, many have put Sappho’s songs to music. Even in the
last few years many have tried their hand at the task. Perhaps the
most successful music, with a real touch of the old Greek flavor, is
that which was composed by Professor Stanley for several of Sappho’s
fragments in connection with Mr. Harrison Grey Fiske’s stage presentation
of Percy Mackaye’s _Sappho and Phaon_. This has been reprinted this
year in a general treatment of Greek music by Professor Stanley of the
University of Michigan. The selections published include “Builders,
Build the Roof-Beam High, Hymenaeon”; “Gath’rers, What Have We Forgot,
Hymenaeon!”; “What shall we do, Cytherea?”; “Hollow Shell, Horny Shell”;
“Akoue, Poseidon”; “Hesper, Eleleu”, etc. Miss Pearl C. Wilson, of Miss
Chandor’s School in New York, a former student of Professor Perry of
Columbia University, without making any pretense of reproducing the
ancient music has composed musical accompaniments for several of the odes
and also of the new fragments, which have been sung with much success.
She tried to illustrate the metre of each fragment, but found it more
satisfactory to write the music without the modern division into bars
and rests, simply indicating the long and short syllables by notes of
different values. This makes possible a lyric delivery of the poems,
each line determined solely by the words and their meaning. In that way
the simple melodies as expressions of the thought gain a great deal when
sung. I can testify from my own public experiments in readings from
Sappho that her fragments can be much better recited or chanted when
accompanied by music, as I am convinced they were originally.
XIII. EPILOGUE AND CONCLUSION
I venture to hope that out of all I have written in the preceding pages
some fairly clear idea of Sappho may have emerged. Yet the discussion
has had to wander widely through literature which has, indeed, been
influenced strongly by her name but journeys far from the Lesbian lyrist
herself. In closing this study it may be well, therefore, to return to
the woman and the poet and add some final words.
The fragments of many other ancient poets have been collected for merely
scholastic reasons, but Sappho’s literary remains are more than antique
specimens. They constitute a great and noble literature and some of
the latest found are among the best. They often rank as highly as the
completed poems of other writers—surely an unparalleled phenomenon. In
them we recognize the creator’s genius as clearly as in a fragmentary
torso of Phidias we see the sculptor’s art in every chiselled line. While
we miss the fullness of her life, we can restore her figure because
the fragments are “the real blood of her heart and the real flame of
her thought.” Nearly every line of them has been imitated, dilated or
diluted, and, disgraceful to say, many who have drunk of her living water
have poisoned it into stagnant and salacious slime. There is nothing like
this in the history of literature. Higginson in 1871 summarized the case: