Part 7 (2/2)
”Peer of G.o.ds he seemeth to me, the blissful Man who sits and gazes at thee before him, Close beside thee sits, and in silence hears thee Silverly speaking, Laughing love's low laughter. Oh this, this only Stirs the troubled heart in my breast to tremble I For should I but see thee a little moment, Straight is my voice hushed; Yea, my tongue is broken, and through and through me 'Neath the flesh impalpable fire runs tingling; Nothing see mine eyes, and a noise of roaring Waves in my ear sounds; Sweat runs down in rivers, a tremor seizes All my limbs, and paler than gra.s.s in autumn, Caught by pains of menacing death, I falter, Lost in the love-trance.”
Epithalamia, or wedding songs, were the most numerous of all Sappho's works, and in them she attained an excellence unequalled by any other poet. Catullus, in despair, seems to have been content with adapting in his marriage odes well-known songs of Sappho. The poet seems to have described all the stages in the ceremony--the Greek maidens leading the pale bride to the expectant bridegroom, chanting their simple chorus to Hymen, the G.o.d of marriage. At one time, they sing the approach of the bridegroom:
”Raise high the roof-beam, carpenters, Hymenaeus!
Like Ares comes the bridegroom, Hymenaeus!
Taller far than a tall man, Hymenaeus!”
But their thoughts are all for the rejoicing bride, who blushes ”as sweet as the apple on the end of the bough.”
”O fair--O sweet!
As the sweet apple blooms high on the bough, High as the highest, forgot of the gatherers: So thou:-- Yet not so: nor forgot of the gatherers; High o'er their reach in the golden air, O sweet--O fair!”
We shall arrange the briefer fragments according to subject, not according to metre, in order that through them we may gain a clear conception of Sappho's att.i.tude toward life and nature, that we may know the poetess in her love and friends.h.i.+p, her longings and her sorrows, her sensibility to the influences of nature and art.
Her conception of love has been already noticed in the longer poems just quoted. A number of the fragments indicate a similar intensity of emotion. Thus she says:
”Lo, Love once more, the limb-dissolving king, The bitter-sweet, impracticable thing, Wild-beast-like rends me with fierce quivering.”
In another:
”Lo, Love once more my soul within me rends Like wind that on the mountain oak descends.”
A being so intense as Sappho, with sensibilities so refined and intuitions so keen, naturally possessed an ardent love of nature. Her power of expressing its charm is shown in a number of fragments. Every aspect of nature seems to have appealed to her.
Of the morning she says:
”Early uprose the golden-sandalled Dawn.”
And of the evening:
”Evening, all things thou bringest Which Dawn spreads apart from each other; The lamb and the kid thou bringest, Thou bringest the boy to his mother.”
And of the night:
”And dark-eyed Sleep, child of Night”
She sings to us also of the
”Rainbow, shot with a thousand hues.”
And of the stars:
”Stars that s.h.i.+ne around the refulgent full moon Pale, and hide their glory of lesser l.u.s.tre When she pours her silvery plenilunar Light on the orbed earth.”
And again of the moon and the Pleiades:
”The moon has left the sky; Lost is the Pleiads' light; It is midnight And time slips by; But on my couch alone I lie.”
Trees and flowers and plants appeal to her as if they were endowed with life, and by her mention of them she calls up to the imagination a tropical summer with its attendant recreations. Thus she sings of the breeze murmuring cool through the apple boughs:
”From the sound of cool waters heard through the green boughs Of the fruit-bearing trees, And the rustling breeze, Deep sleep, as a trance, down over me flows.”
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