O poet-woman! none foregoes
The leap, attaining the repose.
In Matthew Arnold there is much classical influence, but A Modern Sappho has nothing of ancient Sappho. Walter Savage Landor,[179] who looked back to Greece from Rome and by his delightful dialogues made the ancient ages live again, is one of the few who decry Sappho. He seems to be jealous when he says that “Sappho is not the only poetess who has poured forth her melodies to Hesperus, or who had reason to thank him.” He composes ten verses himself entitled Sappho to Hesperus, which are not like Sappho’s at all. Likewise he takes eight lines to express the thought of the despair of the love-sick maiden over her faithless lover, which Sappho depicts in a better picture of a single couplet. Landor finds Sappho deficient in delicacy in her answer to Alcaeus and attributes to her an epigram about Alcaeus which she never wrote. He would obliterate no letter of the invocation to Hesperus by a tear of his. Among the poems of Sappho he finds one written in a different hand from the rest, which pleases him as much as any of them, but it reads like Landor and is inferior to what Sappho would have said. In Simonidea he tries his hand at the Weaving Song:
Mother I cannot mind my wheel
My fingers ache, my lips are dry,
Oh if you felt the pain I feel!
But oh, who ever felt as I?
Charles Kingsley wrote a beautiful poem on Sappho, which well represents her mood; but there is hardly even a faint echo of Sappho’s own fragments unless the words “all her veins ran fever” are accidentally suggested by the second ode.
SAPPHO
She lay among the myrtles on the cliff;