Ill-fated fisher lad, Meniscus’ son,
His father placed as sign of storm and strife
The weel and oar, memorial of his life.
(O’Hara)
The two elegiac couplets on The Dust of Timas, who died before her wedding day, are rather flat and hardly worthy of Sappho’s genius (E. 144); but if Edmonds’ restoration of one of Sappho’s fragments as referring to Timas is correct ([p. 60 above]), it may be genuine and in that case one of the very few surviving early metrical epitaphs. I give you the recent rendering by one of our best modern American poets, Edwin Arlington Robinson:
This dust was Timas; and they say
That almost on her wedding day
She found her bridal home to be
The dark house of Persephone.
And many maidens, knowing then