[As o’er her loom the Lesbian maid In love-sick languor hung her head, Unknowing where her fingers strayed, She weeping turned away, and said,]
‘Oh, my sweet mother, ’tis in vain, I cannot weave, as once I wove, So wildered is my heart and brain With thinking of that youth I love.’
Many fragments deal with the Greek myths. Sappho is one of the first to tell the story of Adonis, who has his analogy in Phaon. “Woe for Adonis” (E. 25); “Woe for him of the four months’ sojourn, Woe for Adonis” (E. 136 uncertain restoration). Another fragment is presumed to be Sappho’s and, probably, to be part of a song sung at the Mytilenaean spring-festival of the marriage of Adonis and Aphrodite, of whose counterpart at Alexandria we have an example in the fifteenth idyl of Theocritus, so well translated by Matthew Arnold:
MAIDENS. Sweet Adonis lies a-dying, Cytherea; what’s to do? CYTHEREA. Beat your breasts and rend your garments, maids, is my behest to you.
O’Hara, Bliss Carman, and many another have expanded this lament for Adonis which we know so well from Bion’s _Lament for Adonis_ and from Shelley’s _Adonais_. I quote the poet laureate of Canada:
What shall we do, Aphrodite? Lovely Adonis is dying. Ah but we mourn him!
Will he return when the Autumn Purples the earth, and the sunlight Sleeps in the vineyard?
Will he return when the Winter Huddles the sheep, and Orion Goes to his hunting?
Ah, for thy beauty, Adonis With the soft springs and the South wind, Love and desire!
Sappho’s knowledge of literature and legend is also not little. She is well acquainted with Homer, who very much influenced Sappho’s language. She knows Helen (E. 38) and her daughter Hermione (E. 44); “Hermione was never such as you are, and just it is to liken you rather to Helen than to a mortal maid.” Or take this complete letter to Anactoria (E. 38), who has eloped with a soldier to Sardis, as beautiful a poem as any of Sappho’s, if not spoiled in the last stanza by the wrong restoration of some scholars. The news of its discovery caused Mr. Osborn to leap out of bed and say he would fight for Sappho to the last with a pen dipt in poison. It reminds one of _The Song of Solomon I. 9_, “I have compared thee, O my love, to a company of horses in Pharaoh’s chariots,” or VI. 10, “Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?” Osborn, Mark Telfair, Marion Mills Miller, T. E. R., and others[178] have given poetic versions in Sapphics of this new poem. Another rendering seems superfluous, but I could not resist the pleasure of adding it, even though in the main less happy than its predecessors. In some of the lines the love of far-off Sappho’s meaning has lured me astray from the nearer English anapaest: