Thou art a glorious madman,
Lodge exclaims,
Born to consume thyself anon in ashes,
And rise again to immortality.
Marlowe replies,
Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say,
What if? I shall have drained my splendor down
To the last flaming drop! Then take me, darkness,
And mirk and mire and black oblivion,
Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is,
Like the wild beasts. I shall be even blest
To be so damned.
Most often this conception of love's flamelike lightening of life for the poet is applied to Sappho. Many modern English poets picture her living "with the swift singing strength of fire." [Footnote: See Southey, Sappho; Mary Robinson (1758-1800), Sappho and Phaon; Philip Moren Freneau, Monument of Phaon; James Gates Percival, Sappho; Charles Kingsley, Sappho; Lord Houghton, A Dream of Sappho; Swinburne, On the Cliffs, Anactoria, Sapphics; Cale Young Rice, Sappho's Death Song; Sara Teasdale, Sappho; Percy Mackaye, Sappho and Phaon; Zoë Akins, Sappho to a Swallow on the Ground; James B. Kenyon, Phaon Concerning Sappho, Sappho (1920); William Alexander Percy, Sappho in Levkos (1920).] Swinburne, in On the Cliffs, claims this as the essential attribute of genius, when he cries to her for sympathy,
For all my days as all thy days from birth
My heart as thy heart was in me as thee
Fire, and not all the fountains of the sea
Have waves enough to quench it; nor on earth
Is fuel enough to feed,
While day sows night, and night sows day for seed.
This intensity of perception is largely the result, or the cause, of the poet's unusually sensitive consciousness of the ephemeralness of love. The notion of permanence often seems to rob love of all its poetical quality. The dark despair engendered by a sense of its transience is needed as a foil to the fiery splendors of passion. Thus Rupert Brooke, in the sonnet, Mutability, dismisses the Platonic idea of eternal love and beauty, declaring,
Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile;
Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over;
Love has no habitation but the heart:
Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile,
Cling, and are borne into the night apart,
The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover.
Sappho is represented as especially aware of this aspect of her love.
Her frenzies in Anactoria, where, if our hypothesis is correct,
Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness,
arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries,