Ainsi qu’un cadavre, il me semble
Que je meurs! que je meurs!
This, of course, is an echo of the famous second ode of Sappho which has influenced all ages and countries and continues so to do. Hardly a year passes without some translation or reminiscence of it in Greece or Italy, in France or Germany, in England or America.
XI. SAPPHO IN ENGLISH AND AMERICAN LITERATURE
Sappho was little read in England and as a writer of poetry probably did not exist, except for a few Englishmen of great learning, before the sixteenth century. Even in the seventeenth century Thomas Stanley, a man of considerable culture, omitted Sappho from his translation of Anacreon (1650). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the imitations limit themselves to the Sapphic metre,[177] with the exception of the famous line in Ben Jonson’s pastoral drama, The Sad Shepherd (Act II, 2): “But best the dear good angel of the spring, The nightingale,” and of Sir Philip Sidney, who seems to have been entirely forgotten by modern writers on Sappho. But it is interesting to note, in the movement led by Gabriel Harvey in pre-Shakesperian days to write English poetry in classical metres, that sapphics were attempted by Harvey’s friend, Sir Philip Sidney, in The Countesse of Pembroke’s Arcadia, which was begun in 1580. One stanza will suffice to show how strained were the strophes thus manufactured:
If mine eyes can speak to do hearty errand,
Or mine eyes’ language she do hap to judge of,
So that eyes’ message be of her received,