I lie alone—
(Tucker)
Sappho’s verses are purer, simpler than the frank poem of Hester Bancroft on an August Night:[95]
God, the night will never end
And I, alone discordant and forlorn,
Unmated, on this love-night of the year!
The other popular song about a girl in love, in a metre which Horace imitated in the twelfth ode of the third book, is as imaginative a description as anything in Coleridge or Keats with whom the Maryland poet, Father Tabb, so aptly compares Sappho. It reminds one of Gretchen’s weaving-song in Faust, and of the English folk-song, “O mother, put my wheel away; I cannot spin to-night.” It is beautifully translated by Thomas Moore, in his Evenings in Greece:
[As o’er her loom the Lesbian maid
In love-sick languor hung her head,
Unknowing where her fingers strayed,