Sappho: One Hundred Lyrics | Page 2

market-place. And under this test its glory grew ever more and more conspicuous. Through those thousand years poets and critics vied with one another in proclaiming her verse the one unmatched exemplar of lyric art. Such testimony, even though not a single fragment remained to us from which to judge her poetry for ourselves, might well convince us that the supremacy acknowledged by those who knew all the triumphs of the genius of old Greece was beyond the assault of any modern rival. We might safely accept the sustained judgment of a thousand years of Greece.
Fortunately for us, however, two small but incomparable odes and a few scintillating fragments have survived, quoted and handed down in the eulogies of critics and expositors. In these the wisest minds, the greatest poets, and the most inspired teachers of modern days have found justification for the unanimous verdict of antiquity. The tributes of Addison, Tennyson, and others, the throbbing paraphrases and ecstatic interpretations of Swinburne, are too well known to call for special comment in this brief note; but the concise summing up of her genius by Mr. Watts-Dunton in his remarkable essay on poetry is so convincing and illuminating that it seems to demand quotation here: "Never before these songs were sung, and never since did the human soul, in the grip of a fiery passion, utter a cry like hers; and, from the executive point of view, in directness, in lucidity, in that high, imperious verbal economy which only nature can teach the artist, she has no equal, and none worthy to take the place of second."
The poems of Sappho so mysteriously lost to us seem to have consisted of at least nine books of odes, together with epithalamia, epigrams, elegies, and monodies. Of the several theories which have been advanced to account for their disappearance, the most plausible seems to be that which represents them as having been burned at Byzantium in the year 380 Anno Domini, by command of Gregory Nazianzen, in order that his own poems might be studied in their stead and the morals of the people thereby improved. Of the efficacy of this act no means of judging has come down to us.
In recent years there has arisen a great body of literature upon the subject of Sappho, most of it the abstruse work of scholars writing for scholars. But the gist of it all, together with the minutest surviving fragment of her verse, has been made available to the general reader in English by Mr. Henry T. Wharton, in whose altogether admirable little volume we find all that is known and the most apposite of all that has been said up to the present day about
"Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song,?Song's priestess, mad with joy and pain of love."
Perhaps the most perilous and the most alluring venture in the whole field of poetry is that which Mr. Carman has undertaken in attempting to give us in English verse those lost poems of Sappho of which fragments have survived. The task is obviously not one of translation or of paraphrasing, but of imaginative and, at the same time, interpretive construction. It is as if a sculptor of to-day were to set himself, with reverence, and trained craftsmanship, and studious familiarity with the spirit, technique, and atmosphere of his subject, to restore some statues of Polyclitus or Praxiteles of which he had but a broken arm, a foot, a knee, a finger upon which to build. Mr. Carman's method, apparently, has been to imagine each lost lyric as discovered, and then to translate it; for the indefinable flavour of the translation is maintained throughout, though accompanied by the fluidity and freedom of purely original work.
C.G.D. ROBERTS.
Now to please my little friend?I must make these notes of spring,?With the soft south-west wind in them?And the marsh notes of the frogs.
I must take a gold-bound pipe,?And outmatch the bubbling call?From the beechwoods in the sunlight,?From the meadows in the rain.
CONTENTS
Now to please my little friend
I Cyprus, Paphos, or Panormus
II What shall we do, Cytherea?
III Power and beauty and knowledge
IV O Pan of the evergreen forest
V O Aphrodite
VI Peer of the gods he seems
VII The Cyprian came to thy cradle
VIII Aphrodite of the foam
IX Nay, but always and forever
X Let there be garlands, Dica
XI When the Cretan maidens
XII In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born
XIII Sleep thou in the bosom
XIV Hesperus, bringing together
XV In the grey olive-grove a small brown bird
XVI In the apple-boughs the coolness
XVII Pale rose-leaves have fallen
XVIII The courtyard of her house is wide
XIX There is a medlar-tree
XX I behold Arcturus going westward
XXI Softly the first step of twilight
XXII Once you lay upon my bosom
XXIII I loved thee, Atthis, in the long ago
XXIV I shall be ever maiden
XXV It was summer when I