Behind Sappho, as behind Burns before he wrote “Green grow the rushes O” or “Auld Lang Syne,” lay a mass of popular ballads and a wealth of lyrical ideas to be seized upon and shaped when the perfect mood arrived. When she sings—
“Sunk is the moon;
The Pleiades are set;
’Tis midnight; soon
The hour is past; and yet
I lie alone”—
it is probable that she is setting one such prehistoric lyrical idea to new words or recasting one such vagrom ditty. It is practically certain that she is doing so in that quatrain which begins “Sweet mother mine, I cannot ply my loom.” That thought is embodied in English folksong also—“O mother, put my wheel away; I cannot spin to-night”—as well as in German and other tongues.
Let us then sweep aside from the memory of Sappho the myths of Phaon and the Leucadian leap, and the calumnies of Athenian worldlings in the comic theatre; let us reject all that Swinburnian hyperbole which makes her “mad” in any sense whatever; and let us simply take her upon the strength of the “few passages, but roses” which are left to us, and upon the word of Alcæus that she was the “violet-weaving, pure, sweetly-smiling Sappho.”
Her life as teacher and æsthetic guide in Lesbos evidently did not pass without a cloud. Her talent, like talent everywhere, found jealous rivals and detractors. A certain Andromeda seems to have caused her special vexation by luring away her favourite pupil Atthis. There were also, then as now, rich but uncultured women who had little love for art and its votaries, particularly if these latter were all too charming. To one such woman Sappho, who, like a true Æolian, looked with horror on a life without poetry and a death unhonoured by song, writes—
“When thou art dead, thou shalt lie, with none to remember or mourn,
For ever and aye; for thy head no Pierian roses adorn;
But e’en in the nether abodes thou shalt herd thee, unnoted, forlorn,
With the dead whom the great dead scorn.”
Her work as poetess, though of everlasting value for what it touches in universal humanity, naturally bears many marks of her country and her time. Besides her songs of personal emotion, she wrote in several of the various forms of occasional verse which we found reason to mention as existing in Lesbos. Of her wedding songs and epithalamia we possess a number of short fragments. Among them is one in the accepted amœbæan or antiphonic style, in which a band of girls mock the men with failure to win some dainty maiden, and the men reply with a taunt at the neglected bloom of the unprofitable virgin. Say the maids—
“On the top of the topmost spray
The pippin blushes red,
Forgot by the gatherers—nay!
Was it “forgot” we said?
’Twas too far overhead!”
Reply the men—
“The hyacinth so sweet
On the hills where the herdsmen go
Is trampled ’neath their feet,
And its purple bloom laid low—”