Ho, the Rose, having curled its sweet leaves for the world,
Takes delight in the motion its petals keep up,
As they laugh to the wind as it laughs from the west!
Sappho, however, does mention the roses of Pieria in the famous lines spoken with characteristic teacher’s tone, almost in the manner of Mrs. Poyser. According to Plutarch, in one passage, the verses are addressed to a wealthy woman, in another passage,[85] to a woman of no refinement or learning; according to Stobaeus,[86] to a woman of no education; probably it was some rich but uncultured Lesbian girl, who would not go to the Lesbian Smith or Vassar or Bryn Mawr:
Thou shalt die and be laid low in the grave, hidden from mortal ken
Unremembered, and no song of the Muse wakens thy name again;
No Pierian rose brightens thy brow, lost in the nameless throng,
Thy dark spirit shall flit forth like a dream, bodiless ghosts among.
(Shorey)
For another expanded version by Swinburne in his Anactoria I must refer to Wharton. Sappho had known and loved the wee wee maiden Atthis when she was an awkward school girl, but now in the bloom of beauty after a sad parting the fickle Atthis has flitted away to another woman’s college and clean forgotten Sappho for a rival teacher, Andromeda; “I loved you, Atthis, long ago, when my own girlhood was still all flowers, and you—you seemed to me a small ungainly child” (E. 48).[87] “So you hate to think of me, Atthis; ’Tis all Andromeda now” (Edmonds).