If none can find Him, then I shall sleep soundly,
Knowing how well on earth your love sufficed me,
A lamp in darkness.
Marion Mills Miller[182] has written some good Sapphics, though his theory of the proper rendition of Sapphic metre will cause some controversy among scholars. We have not the space here to discuss the history of the Sapphic metre, which if not first used by Sappho was first perfected by her. It has been employed extensively in all ages. Horace has it some twenty-six times. Elizabethan renderings can be found in Robinson Ellis’ preface to his translation of Catullus. By Rhabanus (766-856) it was fitted to hymns such as those for the Feast of St. John the Baptist, for Candlemas, Michaelmas, and for the Feast of St. Benedict, and it was employed for his hymns in the Common of Confessors and the Common of Virgins. But no one else has ever caught the Sapphic rhythm and melody so well as Swinburne in his early poem called Sapphics:
All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
Stood and beheld me.
...
Saw the reluctant