Hither now, O Muses, leaving the golden
House of God, unseen in the azure spaces.
(O’Hara’s Muses)
The dawn is golden-slippered (E. 19); something or somebody is more golden than gold (E. 60). “Gold is pure of rust” (E. 109); “Gold is a child of Zeus; no moth nor worm devours it; and it overcomes the strongest of mortal hearts” (E. 110).[92] Sappho’s daughter Cleïs looks like a golden flower (E. 130); “Golden pulse grew on the shore” (E. 139, cf. O’Hara’s poem Golden Pulse). One of many fragments of interest to the student of Greek life and antiquities speaks of “gold-knuckle bowls” (E. 191).[93] Sappho was cited by Menaechmus of Sicyon in his Treatise on Artists as the first to use a lyre called the pectis, and she invented the Mixo-Lydian mode, particularly sensual or emotional, which the Greek tragedians copied from her.
Sappho makes allusions to children which are natural and tender (E. 130). In similes she uses children simply and directly as in The Ode to Hesperus (E. 149) and in the verse, which may refer to a sparrow and which Catullus imitated, “I flutter like a child after her mother” (E. 142).
Sappho from her tender years was inured to the sorrows as well as the joys of love. Two of her fragments (E. 111, 135), the first perhaps a complete poem, represent the loneliness of a long night spent in vain waiting for a lover. Cipollini (1890) and others have often set these to music. They are popular ballads which Sappho must have used just as Burns did in writing Auld Lang Syne. As Tucker says: “It is probable that she is setting one such prehistoric lyrical idea to new words or recasting one such vagrom ditty.” He is thinking, I imagine, of such a Scottish ballad as:
Yestreen I made my bed fu’ brade
The night I’ll make it narrow:
For a’ the livelong winter’s night
I’ll lie twin’d of my marrow.