And bear thee far o’er sea and land,
A captive, to the purple West.”
Renée Vivien (1877-1909), an American poetess of great promise who died all too young and all too unknown to students of Sappho ([see bibliography]), made some very nice French verse translations of Sappho which were published under a pseudonym in 1903 and reprinted anonymously in 1909. She pays her tribute to Sappho in these two verses:
Les siècles attentifs se penchent pour entendre
Les lambeaux de tes chants....
The Maryland poet, Father John B. Tabb, the only American who with Emerson was admitted to the Oxford Garland Series on Epigrams, has two poems on Sappho, in the first of which Keats is appropriately classed with Sappho:[183]
KEATS—SAPPHO
Methinks, when first the nightingale
Was mated to thy deathless song,