In the Greek, as Edwin Cox says, “the sound of the words, the repetition of long vowels particularly omega, the poetic imagery of the whole and the drowsy cadence of the last two words give this fragment a combination of qualities probably not surpassed in any language.” The beautiful verses about the pippin on the topmost branch we shall quote below. In another fragment (E. 3) Sappho sees the stars in a way which Tennyson echoes when he writes: “As when in heaven the stars about the moon Look beautiful.” Or again Sappho’s love of nature appears in the line (E. 112): “the moon rose full and the maidens took their stand about the altar.” In the new Ode to Atthis the moon is not silver (as in E. 3) but rosy-fingered: “after sunset the rosy-fingered moon beside the stars that are about her, when she spreads her light o’er briny sea and eke o’er flowery field, while the dew lies so fair on the ground and the roses revive and the dainty anthrysc and the melilot with all its blooms” (E. 86). Recently (1922) A. C. Benson in The Reed of Pan has combined fragment (E. 3) with the beautiful half stanza quoted above, under the title Moonrise:
The moon high-hung in the hollow night
Resistless pours her silver tide;
Swift, swift the stars withdraw their light,
And their diminished glories hide.
And where cool streams through reed-beds slip,
The breeze through the orchard alley stirs,
And slumber well-nigh seems to drip
From the dark arms of dusky firs.
In another fragment, which we quote below, Sappho pictures a spring midnight with almost astronomical exactness. She loves the sun: “I have loved daintiness [from childhood] and for me love possesses the brightness and beauty of the sun.” William Stebbing in his Minstrel of Love expands the two verses into ten, the last “Dazzling my brain with gazing on the Sun.” Sappho knows the golden-sandalled and queenly dawn (E. 19, 177). She wrote an ode to Hesperus, the Evening Star, of which we have only the tantalizing beginning, “fairest of all the stars that shine” (E. 32). Another graceful fragment quoted in antiquity to show the charm of repetition (E. 149)[83] on the Evening Star, which comes in Catullus too, has influenced not only Byron in Don Juan but Andrew Lang in Helen of Troy (II. 4) and especially Tennyson ([see p. 206]). “That Greek blockhead,” as Sir Walter Scott was called, though he knew more Greek than most undergraduate students of Greek to-day, even if he didn’t know the Sappho fragment, expresses the same idea in the Doom of Dever Girl, “All meet whom day and care divide.”