Since thou dost not share
Roses in Pieria grown.
In the deathful cave,
With the feeble troop
Of the folk that droop,
Lurk and flit and crave,
Woman severed and far-flown.
William Morris, a fine classical scholar, as shown in his Life and Death of Jason, in The Earthly Paradise (1868-1871), expands in a very readable form the story of the Egyptian courtesan, Rhodopis, whom Sappho’s brother, Charaxus, ransomed. About the same time (1870) Rossetti made the combination of two fragments which we have mentioned above ([p. 93]). Some tell us that Oscar Wilde’s heart goes out to Sappho, but so far as I have read I have not been able to find in him any trace of the real Sappho.[178a] On the other hand, Tennyson and Swinburne read her fragments over and over. Tennyson, who thought the Sapphics of Horace to be “much inferior to those of Sappho,” beautifully paraphrases the second ode in Eleänore (1832). In the original edition of Fatima (Dec. 1832), published under the title O Love, Love, Love, he prefixed the first line of this ode as a motto. Many as are the echoes of the sweet-bitter, bitter-sweet antithesis of Sappho (E. 81, [above, p. 57]) in Wharton and other critics, it seems strange that perhaps the most beautiful and deep-hearted of all, Elaine’s song in Tennyson’s Idyl is never cited, so far as I know.[180]
Love, art thou sweet? then bitter death must be: