Lesbus was a land of flowers, of the rose and the violet, “a land rich in corn and oil and wine, in figs and olives, in building-wood and tinted marble,” as Tucker says. But this triangular island (about thirty-five by twenty-five miles) had mountains rising from two to three thousand feet at its corners and two deep fiords on its southern coast. From the northern coast Sappho must often have looked across the short seven miles of laughing sea upon Troyland and thought of the Homeric poems in which Lesbus played such an important rôle.[88] The air like that of Athens as described by Pindar, with a glamor wreathing such cities as Smyrna, was so translucent that in the northeast across the dividing sea many-fountained Ida could easily be seen. It is perhaps an accident that there is so little mention of mountain or sea in Sappho. But she was no “landlubber,” as Professor Allinson would have us believe.[89] Pindar and the other lyric poets were acquainted with the sea and so must Sappho have known it, as she daily saw the ships fly in and out of their haven on white wings ([cf. first stanza of poem on p. 82]). In one of the new fragments (E. 86) we have a marvellous picture of the sea in the last stanza of a poem which otherwise, with its love of flowers, with the beautiful simile of the rosy-fingered moon, is one of the most perfect things in literature. The telepathic and telegraphic sympathy of Sappho startles us and the wireless message sent by night across the severing sea, whose sigh you can hear in the original Greek, anticipates the modern radio.[90] As this is a memory poem, and Anactoria, like Hallam, is “lost,” for the time being at least, I have followed as a model Tennyson’s In Memoriam in metre, stanza, and rhyming. The first line seems to be “remembered” in rhyme as it were after the interval during which the second and third lines have been made and rhymed.
SAPPHO’S GIRL FRIEND ACROSS THE SEA
Atthis, in Sardis far away
Anactoria dear to thee
And dear indeed alike to me
Now dwells, but hither often stray
Her thoughts sent usward by the power
That lives anew the life she loved
When thou her glorious goddess proved,—