This ode alone marks Sappho as a great poetess. The reasons are: (1) the loving notice of little and common flowers, (2) the comparison of Anactoria when surrounded by other women to the moon in the midst of her surrounding stars, the bold personification of the moon secured by the use of the single figure “rosy-fingered,” (3) sudden and masterful survey of land and sea, (4) the successful centering of attention upon Anactoria’s homesickness even in the midst of such far-reaching beauty of land and sea, (5) the remarkably forceful portrayal of what in our day we call thought-transference as seen, for example, in Tennyson’s Aylmer’s Field or Enoch Arden, (6) and not least important, the simplicity and sharpness of outline displayed in the imagery. “Night” is a vague, widely diffused, mystic thing, but Sappho makes us see her a thing of many ears and one of them close to Anactoria’s face. Night does not send a mystic intimation such as Tennyson’s vibration of light might indicate. But she speaks right out in a clear voice that carries far enough to reach across the sea to Sappho. A seventh reason is the strange, hot emotion of love and sorrow and longing that throbs like a pulse in every line and makes the whole letter a living creature. Milton said and lovers of poetry have always agreed that poetry must be simple, sensuous, and passionate. By sensuous he of course meant expressed in images involving the use of the bodily senses. Is there anything in poetry, ancient or modern, that more exactly meets Milton’s requirements than these few lines of Sappho’s letter to her girl friend? Now if this is evident to the reader of an English translation, it is vastly more so to one who knowing the meaning of the words has read them in the Greek and then read them again because they were so sweet, and read them a third time and many times until the music haunts him like the face of a lover. This will rank with Matthew Arnold’s verses To Marguerite in no. 5 of his series of little poems on Switzerland:
Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown
...
Now round us spreads the watery plain—
Oh might our marges meet again!
Who order’d that their longing’s fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cool’d?
Who renders vain their deep desire?
A God, a God their severance ruled!