With promptness I decline,
That I may dwell within the rose
And make its blossoms mine.”
In recent years many poems have appeared on Sappho. For example, thinking perhaps of the story that Solon asked his nephew to teach him a song of Sappho before he died, and echoing the epithet of “sweetly smiling” in Alcaeus’ fragment, Richard Hovey (1864-1900) wrote in The Independent, April 30, 1896, A Dream of Sappho:
I dreamed of Sappho on a summer night,
Her nightingales were singing in the trees
Beside the castled river; and the wind
Fell like a woman’s fingers on my cheek,
And then I slept and dreamed and marked no change;
The night went on with me into my dream,