Thy blossoms gay,
While from the garlandless
She turns away.
Sappho speaks of the golden pulses (E. 139):
[It was summer when I found you
In the meadow long ago,]
And the golden vetch was growing
By the shore.
(Bliss Carman)
Sappho knows the little and common flowers, the dainty anthrysc and melilot, the violets and the lilies (E. 86, 83, 82), but, like Pindar, she especially loves the rose. Meleager’s garland of song assigned the rose to Sappho. She says in one of the new fragments (E. 83): “with many a garland of violets and sweet roses mingled, you have decked my flowing locks as I stood by your side, and with many a woven necklet made of a hundred blossoms you have adorned my dainty throat.” Philostratus in his Letters (51) says: “Sappho loves the rose and always crowns it with a meed of praise, likening beautiful maidens to it; and she compares it to the bared fore-arms of the Graces.” Fragment E. 68 says: “Hither pure rose-armed Graces, daughters of Zeus.” Sappho’s love of the rose has led earlier collectors of Sappho’s fragments to include among her verses the famous song in praise of the rose quoted by Achilles Tatius in his love romance on Clitophon and Leucippe, which Elizabeth Barrett Browning has translated: