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?