Sappho and her influence

by David M. Robinson

Into the morning, and shall flame again

Over a myriad waves. That flame am I,

Nor thou, Poseidon, shalt extinguish me.

My spirit is thy changeling, and returns

To her, who glows beyond the stars of birth—

To her, who is herself time’s passion star.

Many individual American poems have also taken the title or themes from Sappho. Oliver Wendell Holmes refers to her in the fourth stanza of The Voiceless:

Not where Leucadian breezes sweep

O’er Sappho’s memory-haunted billow,

But where the glistening night-dews weep