Sapphic verse

“ Tones that make the heart in my bosom flutter,
For if I, the space of a moment even,
Near to thee come, any word I would utter
Instantly fails me;
Vain my stricken tongue would a whisper fashion,
Subtly under my skin runs fire ecstatic;
Straightway mists surge dim to my eyes and leave them
Reft of their vision;
Echoes ring in my ears; a trembling seizes
All my body bathed in soft perspiration;
Pale as grass I grow in my passion's madness,
Like one insensate;
But must I dare all, since to me unworthy,
Bliss thy beauty brings that a God might envy ”

“ Not to you or any other poet, nor indeed to the very humblest and simplest lover of poetry, will it seem incongruous or strange, suggestive of imperfect sympathy with life or deficient inspiration from nature, that the very words of Sappho should be heard and recognised in the notes of the nightingales, the glory of the presence of dead poets imagined in the presence of the glory of the sky, the lustre of their advent and their passage felt visible as in vision on the live and limpid floorwork of the cloudless and sunset-coloured sea. ”

“ Leaned with face that smiled in immortal beauty,
Leaned to me and asked, "What misfortune threatened?
Why I had called thee?"
"What my frenzied heart craved in utter yearning,
Whom its wild desire would persuade to passion?
What disdainful charms, madly worshipped, slight thee?
Who wrongs thee, Sappho?"
"She that fain would fly, she shall quickly follow,
She that now rejects, yet with gifts shall woo thee,
She that heeds thee not, soon shall love to madness,
Love thee, the loth one!" ”

“ Passion moves the poet to intensity, which is attained by selection of those sensory images which are significant. Thus the treatise praises the ode by Sappho which it quotes, because the poet has taken the emotions incident to the frenzy of love from the attendant symptoms, from actuality, and first selected and then closely combined those which were conspicuous and intense. ”

“ But Love, half veiled by broken words and tears.
You! you! who left me without kiss or tear
Or word, to murmur softly like a child
Begotten of thy voice, deception were
Less cruel far than silence, you who smiled
Falsely so often, had you no false phrase—
You who so often had false tales to tell—
No voice there, at the parting of our ways,
To say "Farewell, O Love!" or just "Farewell"!
I had no gift to give you when you passed,
And wrongs were all the gifts received from thee,
I had no words to tell you at the last
But these: "Forgo not life, forget not me." ”

“ SAPPHO ONE HUNDRED LYRICS BY BLISS CARMAN 1907
“SAPPHO WHO BROKE OFF A FRAGMENT OF HER SOUL FOR US TO GUESS AT.” “SAPPHO, WITH THAT GLORIOLE OF EBON HAIR ON CALMÈD BROWS— O POET-WOMAN! NONE FORGOES THE LEAP, ATTAINING THE REPOSE.” E.B. BROWNING. INTRODUCTION THE POETRY OF SAPPHO.—If all the poets and all the lovers of poetry should be asked to name the most precious of the priceless things which time has wrung in tribute from the triumphs of human genius, the answer which would rush to every tongue would be “The Lost Poems of Sappho.” ”

“ Let passion's tingling warmth her being touch!
Come to me, Goddess, come as once of old,
Hearing my voice implore thee from afar,
I drew to earth thy dazzling avatar;
Accord the smile of piercing bliss untold.
Ask me the dear suave question phrased of yore;
"Sappho, who grieveth now thy mad fond heart?
Wouldst win her beauty, she who frowns apart?
Wild as thou lovest, she soon shall love thee more."
O fair Olympian, answer thus, I pray!
Release me from this torment, yield my arms
The transport thirsted of her folded charms,
In glow that welds her heart to mine for aye.
EROS ”

“ Sappho now calls thee, lyre and Lyric Muse
Forgotten, and the tears born of her wrongs
Blinding her eyes, upturned but to refuse
Phœbus, the fountain of all joyous songs.
I burn, as when in swiftness, past the byres,
Flame takes the corn, borne by the winds that blow ”

“ Verse after verse runs thus:—
"Sighs in the gale, and whispers in the grot."
"Spans the pale nations with colossal stride." The sweetness here is great, but, most undoubtedly, verse possessed of a much more perfect and uncloying species of melody has been produced by those poets who have admitted greater variety into the composition of their lines. The licence used by Shakspeare, for example, in respect of rhythm, accent, and pause, is unlimited; and beautiful, indeed, are the results:—
"The quality of mercy ́ is not strain'd. ”

“ You call me a sophist, and you allege that it is a sophist’s business to make small things great and great things small. And you maintain that the object of my letter was to prove yours a good one, when it was not a good one, and that it was no better than the one which you have sent last, and, in a word that you have no power of expression, the books which you have now in hand producing no such effect, and the eloquence which you once possessed having all disappeared. ”

“ If anything can justify the serious and deliberate display of merely physical emotion in literature or in art, it must be one of two things; intense depth of feeling expressed with inspired perfection of simplicity, with divine sublimity of fascination, as by Sappho ”

“ The strong sweet loveliness of all things made, 10
And the serenity of inward joy
Beyond the storm of tears.
LIX Will none say of Sappho,
Speaking of her lovers,
And the love they gave her,—
Joy and days and beauty,
Flute-playing and roses, 5
Song and wine and laughter,—
Will none, musing, murmur,
“Yet, for all the roses,
All the flutes and lovers,
Doubt not she was lonely 10
As the sea, whose cadence
Haunts the world for ever.” ”

“ And tears, and thread, and balls, and thimbles mix.
Sappho, 'tis true, long vers'd in epic song,
For years esteem'd all household studies wrong;
When, dire mishap, though neither shame nor sin,
Sappho herself, and not her muse, lies in. ”

“ There is not a fragment of Sappho that is not surrounded in the mind of the reader by the rainbow of suggestion. Just as the gods draped the human form to give desire imagination, so, perhaps, some god and no fate has all but hidden the mind of Sappho. ”

“ Yearns thy soul—say whom shall my glamour chaining
Hale thy love's thrall, Sappho?—and who is wronging
⁠Thee with disdaining?
Who avoids thee soon shall be thy pursuer:
Ay, the gift-rejecter the giver shall now be:
Ay, the loveless now shall become the wooer,
⁠Scornful shalt thou be!"
Once again come! Come, and my chains dissever,
Chains of heart-ache! Passionate longings rend me—
Oh fulfil them! Thou in the strife be ever
⁠Near, to defend me! ”

“ A few faint echoes have come to us across the centuries,—a verse, a line, a trait, a word, a heart-cry,—and that is all. Even these give us glimpses of its personal rather than of its intellectual side. Of the quality of its [Pg 40] work we cannot judge, as there is little of it left. That it was thought worthy of praise in its day, with Sappho as a standard, proves at least a high degree of merit. She was musician as well as poet, and trained many of the maidens for singing in sacred festivals, as well as in the arts of poetry and manners. ”

“ The world has suffered no greater literary loss than the loss of Sappho's poems. So perfect are the smallest fragments preserved that we muse in a sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems must have been. Of all the poets of the world, of all the illustrious artists of all literature, Sappho is the one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and illimitable grace. ”

“ Then he would captiously maintain that the three youths in the furnace of raging fire had leisure enough to amuse themselves with making poetry, and to summon all the elements in turn to praise God. Or what was there miraculous, he would say, or what indication of divine inspiration, in the slaying of the dragon with a lump of pitch, or in frustrating the schemes of the priests of Bel? Such deeds were more the results of an able man’s forethought than of a prophetic spirit. ”

“ It is not easy for the inattentive to retain in their memory, when they go home, an injunction of an apostle or prophet; but the sayings of the Psalms are sung in our houses and travel with us through the streets. Let a man begin even to grow savage as some wild beast, and no sooner is he soothed by psalm-singing than straightway he goes home with passions lulled to calm and quiet by the music of the song. ”

“ A woman and a poet; adored by men and loved by her own sex; artist, singer, teacher, leader; an exile and an immortal—all this was the Sappho who stood upon the heights twenty-five centuries ago and sang the verses that thrilled the heart of the world. She lived in the brilliant period when lyric poetry reached its zenith and was its finest representative. ”

“ Fashioned for beauty’s fulfilment,
Mated as rhythm to reed-stop 15
Whence the wild music is moulded,
Ever appears the full measure
Of the world’s wonder.
XXXIV “Who was Atthis?” men shall ask,
When the world is old, and time
Has accomplished without haste
The strange destiny of men.
Haply in that far-off age 5
One shall find these silver songs,
With their human freight, and guess
What a lover Sappho was. ”

“ Approximation is all that even genius can hope for in the attempt. An important point to remember in considering the construction and metre of the Sapphic poems is that we may take it for certain that they were always delivered in the form of a recitative or chant, and that they were nearly always accompanied by music on one or more of the stringed instruments for which Lesbos was famous at the time when Sappho lived. ”

“ Now what is the use of his examples, if they do not really accomplish his own promise of making his meaning clearer to us; [1] not, indeed, that we are bound to admit their sense, but that we may discover more plainly and openly what is his drift and purpose in using them? “That we are able,” says he, “to see with our eyes is not of us; but it is of us that we make a good or a bad use of our sight.” Well, there is an answer for him in the psalm, in which the psalmist says to God, “Turn Thou away mine eyes, that they behold not iniquity.” ”

“ With the soul of a Sappho, she lived like a nun,
Hid her thoughts from all women, from men kept apart,
And carefully guarded the book of her heart
From the world's prying eyes. Yet men read through the cover,
And knew that the story was food for a lover.
(The dullest of men seemed possessed of the art
To read what the passions inscribe on the heart.
Though written in cipher and sealed from the sight,
Yet masculine eyes will interpret aright.) ”

“ The fame of Sappho, as the greatest poetess of all time, rests mainly on tradition, which for us moderns is confirmed by one complete poem, two incomplete ones, and over 170 fragments, one consisting of six lines, ten of four, seven of three, twenty-seven of two, and the rest of not more than one line, sometimes of only one word. No other poet inherits such great fame on so slight a foundation. ”

“ In this fluctuation, in the midst of these dangers and these difficulties, because, that in consequence of the abundance of offences “the love of many is waxing cold,” [16] although the law of the Lord inspires delight, in this fluctuation then, (I say) , “then spake I with my tongue.” To whom? not to the hearer whom I would fain instruct; but to Him who heareth and taketh heed also, by whom I would fain be instructed myself. “I spake with my tongue” to Him, from whom I inwardly hear whatever I hear that is good or true.—What saidst thou? ”

“ How shall we be partakers of those wonderful mysteries by means of the same tongue with which we have trampled upon God’s law, the same tongue with which we have contaminated the soul? For if no one would dare to receive the royal purple with filthy hands, how shall we receive the Lord’s Body with a tongue that has become polluted! For the oath is of the wicked one, but the Sacrifice is of the Lord. ”

“ Make use of all dialectic art—all the prudence of this world, and that foolish wisdom which consists in wordy subtlety. Turn yourself about in every direction, and draw in your horns. Do whatever you can with ingenuity and art. Say what you like, and do what you like; you cannot possibly get out of this without confessing that what the Apostle touched was God. And indeed, if the thing can possibly be done, perhaps you will want to alter the statement of the gospel story, so that we may not read that the Apostle Thomas touched the body of the Lord, or that he called Christ Lord and God. ”

“ When the sophist would supplant, with the wild theories of his worldly wisdom, the positive mandates of inspiration, let him remember the expansion of his own feeble intellects, and pause—let him feel the wisdom of God, in what is partially concealed, as well as in that which is revealed;—in short, let him substitute humility for pride of reason—let him have faith, and live! ”

“ But do thou, O Christ, Saviour of mankind, be present to aid me in my hallowed task! Direct the words which celebrate thy virtues, [2] and instruct me worthily to sound thy praises. And now, let no one expect to listen to the graces of elegant language: for well I know that the nerveless eloquence of those who speak to charm the ear, and whose aim is rather applause than sound argument, is distasteful to hearers of sound judgment. ”