We quench the spark a smouldering hope supplies.
We have already referred to Alan Seeger’s use of the famous midnight fragment ([p. 78]). The magazines are fond of the subject of Sappho and Phaon and have countless poems which refer to Phaon and the Leucadian Leap. Buchanan has a poem called The Leucadian Rock; and Edward J. O’Brien in the Liberator says:
Stir not the grasses here,
O wandering zephyr,
For Phaon travelled far over alien foam
Before his footsteps turned in soft contentment
Home to the green threshold
He had forgotten.
Sara Teasdale, the modern burning American Sappho, has a poem on Phaon and the Leucadian Leap in Scribner’s Magazine, for December, 1913, pp. 725-6. The poem is too long to quote entire, and I can give only a few lines:
Farewell; across the threshold many feet