Love; thy own sin slew it, as on the meadow’s
Verge declines, un-gently beneath the ploughshare
Stricken, a flower.
(Robinson Ellis)
From these lines and not from Sappho herself, of whom there is no echo in Virgil, Virgil took his description of the dying Euryalus:
And like the purple flower the plough cuts down
He droops and dies.
(Aeneid, IX. 435)
We are reminded of Robert Burns’ To A Mountain Daisy:
But now the share uptears thy bed,