In all the fragments, new or old, there is an indefinable quality of personal feeling. Sappho, it has been said, has left us only a fragment of her work, but it is a fragment of her soul. Her friend and rival, Alcæus, is a great poet, but he lacks the fiery intensity of her inspiration, which gives life even to the briefest phrase that some grammarian has quoted for a rare word. Take the lines that Rossetti adapted:
Like the sweet apple which reddens upon topmost bough, A-top on the topmost twig—which the pluckers forget somehow, Forget it not—nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now. Like the wild hyacinth flower, which on the hills is found, Which the passing feet of the shepherds for ever tear and wound, Until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground.
Dead, dead.—In death, Below the ground, bereft of breath, Silent, alone, the close-shut tomb enfoldeth thee. To my songs thou wouldst not hearken, and songless shalt thou be; Thou wouldst not love me here on earth, In death thou shalt loveless be.
Mr. Edmonds, in his translations, has kept much of the simple charm of the Greek:
I have a little daughter rare, That’s like the golden flowers fair, My Cleis. I would not take all Lydia wide, No, nor lovely Greece beside, For Cleis.
And often as her way she wanders, And on gentle Attis ponders, With sad longing love opprest, Her heart devours her tender breast Till she cries, in pain, ‘Oh, come to me,’ for you and I Know the burden of her cry, Since Night, which hath the myriad ears, Sends her word of what she hears Across the severing main.
This tender simplicity is the soul of Sappho, and in her verse even a few words will suggest a picture:
Come to me, O Love: O Love, the inheritor, enter in. Everywhere is swept and garnished, Everything is prepared. The fire of my heart burns brightly, All my body is food for thee, And on my bosom thou shalt sleep the long night through.
ἐπὶ δὲ στήθεος ἐννυχεύσεις. Surely no one save Sappho has touched so closely the heart of love and poetry.
The chief characteristic of Ionian literature is a certain softness, a kind of laxity of morals corresponding to a looseness of political organisation. The Ionian man was a convinced believer in freedom—for himself; but he was by no means a believer in the discipline which alone makes freedom possible. Both in sexual matters and in politics, his desire for freedom and his desire for pleasure were constantly at cross-purposes. He wished to be independent of women; but he was not meant by nature to be a monk, and he purchased his apparent freedom by yielding to a sensuality far more degrading than that of women’s love. He wished to be independent of Persia; but he was not a born soldier, and he finally bought a pretence of autonomy by the payment of tribute to a Persian satrap, forfeiting his manhood for the sake of peace.