I charge thee Phaon, by this deed of woe,
To meet me in the Elysian shades below,
No rival beauty shall pretend a share,
Sappho alone shall walk with Phaon there.
She spoke, and downward from the mountain’s height
Plung’d in the plashy wave to everlasting night.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) in the index to the first volume of the Southern Literary Messenger states that a stanza of Sappho’s second ode is embodied in his poem, To Sarah:
In such an hour when are forgot
The World, its cares and my own lot