Who would run at dusk
Along the surges creeping up the shore
When tides come in to ease the hungry beach,
And running, running till the night was black,
Would fall forspent upon the chilly sand,
And quiver with the winds from off the sea.
Ah! quietly the shingle waits the tides
Whose waves are stinging kisses, but to me
Love brought no peace, nor darkness any rest.
[Footnote: In the end, Sara Teasdale does show her winning content,
in the love of her baby daughter, but it is significant that this
destroys her lyric gift. She assures Aphrodite,
If I sing no more
To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God,
It is that thou hast made my life too sweet
To hold the added sweetness of a song.
* * * * *
I taught the world thy music; now alone
I sing for her who falls asleep to hear.]
Swinburne characteristically shows her literally tearing the flesh in her quest of the divinity that is reflected there. In Anactoria she tells the object of her infatuation:
I would my love could kill thee: I am satiated
With seeing thee alive, and fain would have thee dead.
* * * * *
I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,
Intense device and superflux of pain.
And after detailing with gusto the bloody ingenuities of her plan of torture, she states that her motive is,
To wring thy very spirit through the flesh.
The myth that Sappho's agony resulted from an offense done to Aphrodite, is several times alluded to. In Sappho and Phaon she asserts her independence of Aphrodite's good will, and in revenge the goddess turns Phaon's affection away from Sappho, back to Thalassa, the mother of his children. Sappho's infatuation for Phaon, the slave, seems a cruel jest of Aphrodite, who fills Sappho with a wholly blind and unreasoning passion. In all three of Swinburne's Lesbian poems, Aphrodite's anger is mentioned. This is the sole theme of Sapphics, in which poem the goddess, displeased by Sappho's preferment of love poetry to the actual delights of love, yet tried to win Sappho back to her:
Called to her, saying "Turn to me, O my Sappho,"
Yet she turned her face from the Loves, she saw not
Tears or laughter darken immortal eyelids….
Only saw the beautiful lips and fingers,
Full of songs and kisses and little whispers,
Full of music; only beheld among them
Soar as a bird soars
Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel
Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion,
Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders,
Clothed with the wind's wings.
It seems likely that this myth of Aphrodite's anger is an allegory indicating the tragic character of all poetic love, in that, while incarcerated in the body, the singer strives to break through the limits of the flesh and to grasp ideality. The issue is made clear in Mackaye's drama. There Sappho's rival is Thalassa, Phaon's slave-mate, who conceives as love's only culmination the bearing of children. Sappho, in her superiority, points out that mere perpetuation of physical life is a meaningless circle, unless it leads to some higher satisfaction. But in the end the figure of "the eternal mother," as typified by Thalassa, is more powerful than is Sappho, in the struggle for Phaon's love. Thus Aphrodite asserts her unwillingness to have love refined into a merely spiritual conception.
Often the greatest poets, as Sappho herself, are represented as having no more than a blind and instinctive apprehension of the supersensual beauty which is shining through the flesh, and which is the real object of desire. But thus much ideality must be characteristic of love, it seems obvious, before it can be spiritually creative. Unless there is some sense of a universal force, taking the shape of the individual loved one, there can be nothing suggestive in love. Instead of waking the lover to the beauty in all of life, as we have said, it would, as the non-lover has asserted, blind him to all but the immediate object of his pursuit. Then, the goal being reached, there would be no reason for the poet's not achieving complete satisfaction in love, for there would be nothing in it to suggest any delight that he does not possess. Therefore, having all his desire, the lover would be lethargic, with no impulse to express himself in song. Probably something of this sort is the meaning of the Tannhauser legend, as versified both by Owen Meredith and Emma Lazarus, showing the poet robbed of his gift when he comes under the power of the Paphian Venus. Such likewise is probably the meaning of Oscar Wilde's sonnet, Hélas, quoted above.