Love, thou art bitter; sweet is death to me.
O Love, if death be sweeter, let me die.
Tennyson echoes the third fragment, as we have seen ([p. 63]); and he re-echoes through Horace another fragment in his Epilogue ([p. 36]). In Fatima, “Love, O withering might” suggests another fragment. In Leonine Elegiacs we have a better adaptation than in Byron of the Hesperus hymn:
The ancient poetess singeth, that Hesperus all things bringeth,
Smoothing the wearied mind: bring me my love, Rosalind.
In Locksley Hall Sixty Years After he again uses the same Sapphic fragment: “Hesper, whom the poet call’d the Bringer home of all good things.” His brother, Frederick Tennyson, who was such a good Greek scholar that he won the medal at Trinity College for a Greek poem, in his Isles of Greece (1890) used several adaptations and translations of Sappho, the prettiest being those about Sappho’s child Cleïs, about Hesper and the summer noonday siesta by the cool waters. Many writers of lyrics in England and Scotland have thought of Sappho, but generally of the Phaon story, as recently did Thomas McKie in his Lyric on Love:[181]
Bewildered with her love and grief,
From lone Leucadia’s stormy steep
Distracted Sappho sought relief,
By plunging in the whelming deep.