“He laid aside his guitar and lit his pipe, that made a pink glow in the darkness. He tried to form in his mind an image of Sappho and of her Isle of Lesbos, tried to wander back through the labyrinthine ages, ages misty with music, dusky with gold, red with wars, and blushing with roses—forgotten wars, faded roses mingling to form the perfume of the centuries. He pulled on his pipe. ‘Where is she now?’ Easy enough to imagine Sappho with her ivory throat, her violet eyes and sandals of golden dawn, back in the golden dawn of poetry. For, overhead, these were her stars. But he wondered about the form her singing soul had taken after she had leaped into the Ionian Sea. Had the waters quenched the spark, or was her soul immortal—a flame that twenty-five hundred years had failed to extinguish? Again he asked: ‘Where are you now? Where in this, the most cluttered up of all the ages?’ He tried to imagine her beside the Little Calfpasture—Sappho beside the Calfpasture Creek, sighing, laughing, singing her lyrics! ‘No use falling in love! Sang your songs twenty-five hundred years ago!’”
In May, 1922, Miss Bertha Bennett of Carleton College produced an interesting pageant “A Grecian Festival” on the Sappho and Phaon story, with adaptations of Sappho’s first two odes and representing Sappho as leaping into Lyman lake. It ends with the union of Sappho and Phaon, after death, on Mt. Olympus.
AN ADDENDUM ON SAPPHO IN RUSSIAN
Many Russian writers mention Sappho, especially Vyacheslav Ivanov; and in a volume republished in Berlin, 1923, (Zovy Drevnosti, Echoes of the Past) Konstantin Dmitriyevich Balmont has translated eight of Sappho’s fragments. The same poet (Zacharovanny Grot, The Enchanted Grotto, vol. III, 1908) has published a poem on Sappho which my former student, now of Columbia University, Dr. Clarence Manning, has translated in the original metre:
O Sappho, thou dost know alone
How hard the poet strives revealing
The secrets beauty once has shown
In moments of immortal feeling.
O Sappho, thou dost know alone—
Thy name a perfume’s sweetness holy—