FRAGMENTS OF SAPPHO.

H.B.

THE ISLAND.

Fragments of Euphuia.

Alexandrine

"Little, but all roses" is the dictate of the poet,
yet I am inclined to disagree. I would not bring roses, nor
yet the great shaft of scarlet lilies. I would bring orange
blossoms, implacable flowerings made to seduce the sense when
every other means has failed, poignard that glints, fresh
sharpened steel; after the red heart, red lilies, impassioned
roses are dead.

"Little, but all roses" - true there is a tint of rich
colour ( invariably we find it ) violets, purple woof of
cloth, scarlet garments, dyed fastening of a sandal, the
lurid, crushed and perished hyacinth, stains on cloth and
flesh and parchment.

There is gold too. Was it a gold rose the poet meant ?
But the gold of a girl-child's head, the gold of an embroidered
garment hem, the rare gold of sea-grass or meadow-pulse does
not seem to evoke in our thought the vision of roses, heavy
in a scented garden.

"Little, but all roses". I think, though the stains
are deep on the red and scarlet cushions, on the flaming
cloak of love, it is not warmth we look for in these poems,
not fire nor sunlight, not heat in the ordinary sense, diffused,
and comforting ( nor is it light, day or dawn or light of
sun-setting ) but another element containing all these,

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magnetic, vibrant; not the lighting as it falls from the
thunder cloud, yet lightning in a sense, white, unhuman
element, containing fire and light and warmth, yet in its
essence differing from all these, as if the brittle crescent-
moon gave heat to us, or some splendid, scintillating star
turned warm suddenly in our hand like a jewel, sent by the
beloved.

I think of the words of Sappho as these colours, or states
rather, transcending colour yet containing ( as great heat the
compass of the spectrum ) all colour. And perhaps the most
obvious is this rose colour, merging to richer shades of
scarlet, purple or Phoenician purple. To the superficial
lover - truly - roses !

Yet not all roses - not roses at all, not orange blossoms
even, but reading deeper we are inclined to visualize these broke
sentences and unfinished rhythms as rocks - perfect rock
shelves and layers of rock between which flowers by some chance
may grow but which endure when the staunch blossoms have
perished.

Not flowers at all, but an island with innumerable,
tiny, irregular bays and fjords and little straits between
which the sun lies clear ( fragments out from a perfect mirror
of iridescent polished silver or of the bronze reflecting
richer tints ) or breaks wave upon destructive passionate
wave.

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Not roses, but an island, a country, a continent, a
planet, a world of emotion, differing entirely from any
present day imaginable world of emotion; a world of emotion
that could only be imagined by the greatest of her own
countrymen in the greatest period of that country's glamour,
who themselves confessed her beyond their reach, beyond
their song, not a woman, not a goddess even, but a song or
the spirit of a song.

A song, a spirit, a white star that moves across the\heaven once in a world's history to mark the end of a world
epoch or to presage some coming glory.

Yet she is embodied > terribly a human being, a woman,
a personality as the most impersonal become when they confront
their fellow beings.

The under-lip curls out in the white face, she has
twisted her two eyes unevenly, the brows break the perfect
line of the white forehead, her expression is not exactly
sinister ( sinister and dead ) the spark of mockery beneath
the half-closed lids is rather living destructive irony.

" What country girl bewitches your heart who knows not
how to draw her skirt about her ankles ? "

Aristocratic - indifferent - full of caprice - full of
imperfection - intolerant.

High in the mountains, the wind may break the trees, as
love the lover > but this was before the days of Theocritus >

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before the destructive Athenian satyric drama → we hear no
praise of mountain girls nor mountain goats. This woman
has still the flawless tradition to maintain.

Her bitterness was on the whole the bitterness of the
sweat of Eros. Had she burned to destroy she had spent her
flawless talent to destroy custom and mob-thought with
serpent-tongue before the great Athenian era.

Black and burnt are the cheeks of the girl of the late
Sicilian Theocritus, for says he, black is the hyacinth and
the myrtle-berry.

But Sapho has no praise for mountain-girls. She
protrudes a little her under-lip, twists her eyes, screws
her face out of proportion as she searches for the most
telling phrase; this girl who bewitches you, my friend,
does not even know how to draw her skirts about her feet.

Sophisticated, ironical, bitter jeer. Not her hands,
her feet, her hair, or her features resemble in any way
those of the country-bred among the thickets; not her
garments even, are ill-fitting or ill-out, but her manners,
her gestures are crude, the bitterest of all destructive
gibes of one sensitive woman at the favourite of another,
sensitive, high-strung, autocratic as herself.

The gods, it is true, Aphrodite, Hermes, Ares, Hephaistos,
Adonis, beloved of the mother of loves, the Graces, Zeus himself,
Eros in all his attributes, great, potent, the Muses, mythical
being and half-god, the Kyprian again and again are mentioned

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in these poems but at the end, it is for the strange almost petulant little phrases that we value this woman, this cry ( against some simple unknown girl ) of skirts and ankles we might think unnecessarily petty, yet are pleased in the thinking of it, or else the outbreak against her own intimate companions brings her nearer our own over-sophisticated, nerve-wracked era; " The people I help most are the most unkind ", " O you forget me " or " You love someone better ", " You are nothing to me ", nervous, trivial tirades. Or we have in sweetened mood so simple a phrase " I sing " - not to please any god, goddess, creed or votary of religious rite - I sing not even in abstract contemplation, trance-like, remote from life, to please myself, but says this most delightful and friendly woman, " I sing and I sing beautifully like this, in order to please my friends - my girl-friends. "

We have no definite portraits from her hands of these young women of Mitylene. They are left to our imagination, though only the most ardent heart, the most intense spirit and the most brave and subtle intellect can hope even in moments of most ardent imagination, to fill in these broken couplets. One reads simply this " My darling ", or again " You burn me ". To a bride's lover she says " Ah there never was a girl like her." She speaks of the light spread across a lovely face, of the garment wrapt about a lovely body , she addresses by name two of these young women comparing one to another's disadvantage † ( though even here she temporizes her judgement

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with an endearing adjective ) ♃ " Mnasidika is more shapely
than tender Gyrinno." We hear of Eranna too. " Eranna,
there never was a girl more spiteful than you. "

Another girl she praises, not for beauty. Though they
stand among tall spotted lilies and the cup of Jacynth and the
Lesbian iris, she yet extolls beyond Kypris and the feet of
Eros, wisdom. " Ah," she says of this one, beloved for
another beauty than that of perfect waist and throat and
close-bound cap of hair and level brows, " I think no girl
can ever stand beneath the sun or ever will again and be as
wise as you are. "

Wisdom - this is all we know of the girl, that though she
stood in the heavy Graeco-Asiatic sunlight, the wind from
Asia, heavy with ardent myrrh and Persian spices, was yet
tempered with a Western gale, bearing in its strength and
its salt sting, the image of another, tall, with eyes shadowed
by the helmet rim, the goddess, indomitable.

This is her strength - Sappho of Mitylene was a Greek.
And in all her eostasies, her burnings, her Asiatic riot of
colour, her cry to that Poenician deity, " Adonis, Adonis -"
her phrases, so simple yet in any but her hands in danger of
overpowering sensuousness, her touches of Oriental realism,
" purple napkins " and " soft cushions " are yet tempered,
moderated by a craft never surpassed in literature. The
beauty of Aphrodite it is true is the constant, reiterated

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subject of her singing. But she is called by a late
Scholiast who knew more of her than we can hope to learn
from these brief fragments,

We need the testimony of no Alexandrian or late Roman
scholiast to assure us of the artistic wisdom, the scientific
precision of metre and musical notation, the finely tempered
intellect of this woman. Yet for all her artistic moderation
what is the personal, the emotional quality of her wisdom?
This woman whom love paralysed till she seemed to herself a
dead body yet burnt, as the desert grass is burnt, white by
the desert heat, she who trembled and was sick and sweated
at the mere presence of another, a person, doubtless of
charm, of grace, but of no extraordinary gifts perhaps of
mind or feature - was she moderate, was she wise? Savanarola
standing in the courtyard of the Medici ( some two thousand
years later ) proclaimed her openly to the assembled youthful
laiety and priests of Florence - a devil.

If moderation is wisdom, if constancy in love is wisdom,
was she wise? We read even in these few existing fragments,
name upon curious, exotic, fragment name : Atthis - Andromeda -
Mnasidika - Eranna - Gyrinno - more, many more than these,
tradition tells were praised in the lost fragments. The name
of muse and goddess and of human woman merge, interspersed
among these verses. " Niobe and Leda were friends - " it
is a simple statement - for the moment, Niobe and Leda are

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nearer, more human, than the Atthis, the Eranna who strike
and burn and break like Love himself.

The wise Sappho ! She was wise, emotionally wise,
we suspect with wisdom of simplicity, the blindness of
genius. She constructed from the simple gesture of a
half-grown awkward girl, a being, a companion, an equal. She
imagined, for a moment, as the white bird wrinkled a pink
foot, clutching to obtain balance at the too smooth ivory
of the wrist of the same Atthis, that Atthis had a mind,
that Atthis was a goddess. Because the sun made a
momentary circle of strange rust-coloured hair, she saw in
all her fragrance, Aphrodite, violet-crowned, or better still
a sister, a muse, one of the violet wreathing. She imagined
because the girl's shoulders seemed almost too fragile, too
frail, to support the vestment, dragging a little heavily because
of the gold-binding, that the same shoulders were the shoulders
of a being, an almost disembodied spirit. She constructed
perfect and flawless ( as in her verse, she carved from current
 Aeolic dialect, immortal phrases ) the whole, the perfection,
the undying spirit of goddess, muse or sacred being from the
simple grace of some tall, half-developed girl. The very
skies open, were open by these light fingers, fluffing out
the under-feathers of the pigeon's throat. Then the wise
Sappho clamours aloud against that bitter, bitter creature,

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Eros, who has once more betrayed her. " Ah, Atthis, you hate even to think of me - you have gone to Andromeda. "

I love to think of Atthis and Andromeda curled on a sun-baked marble bench like the familiar Tanagra group, talking it over. What did they say ? What did they think ? Doubtless, they thought little or nothing and said much,

There is another girl, a little girl. Her name is Cleis. It is reported that the mother of Sappho was named Cleis. It is said that Sappho had a daughter whom she called Cleis.

Cleis was golden. No doubt Cleis was perfect. Cleis was a beautiful baby, looking exactly like a yellow flower ( so her mother tells us ). She was so extraordinarily beautiful, Lydia had nothing so sweet, so spiced; greatness, wealth, power, nothing in all Lydia could be exchanged for Cleis.

So in the realm of the living, we know there was a Cleis. I see her heaping shells, purple and rose-edged, stained here and there with saffron colours, shells from Adriatic waters heaped in her own little painted bowl and poured out again and gathered up only to be spilt once more across the sands. We have seen Atthis of yester-year, Andromeda of " fair requital ", Mnasidika with provoking length of over-shapely limbs, Gyrinno, loved for some appealing gesture or strange resonance of voice or skill of finger-tips, though failing in the essential and more obvious qualities of beauty, Eranna with lips curved contemptuously over slightly irregular though white and perfect

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teeth; angry Eranna who refused everyone and bound
white violets only for the straight hair she herself
braided with precision and cruel self-torturing neatness
about her own head. We know of Gorgo, over-riotous,
too heavy, with special intoxicating sweetness, but
exhausting, a girl to weary of, no companion, her
over-soft curves presaging early development of heavy
womanhood.

Among the living there are these and others. Timas,
dead among the living, lying with lily wreath and funeral
torch, a golden little bride, lives though sleeping more
poignantly even than the famous Graeco-Egyptian beauty
the poet's brother married at Naucratis, Rhodope, a name
redolent, ( even although we may no longer read the
tribute of the bridegroom's sister ) of the heavy
out-curling, over-lapping petals of the peerless
flower.

Little - not little - but all, all roses ! So at
the last, we are forced to accept the often quoted tribute
of Meleager, late Alexandrian, half Jew, half Grecoian
poet. Little but all roses ! True, Sappho has become
for us a name, an abstraction as well as a pseudonym for
poignant human feeling, she is indeed rocks set in a blue
sea, she is the sea itself, breaking and tortured and
torturing, but never broken, she is the island of artistic
perfection where the lover of ancient beauty ( shipwrecked
in the modern world ) may yet find foothold and take breath
and gain courage for new ventures and dream of yet
unexplored continents and realms of future

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artistic achievement. She is the wise Sappho.

Plato, poet and philosopher, in the most formidable
period of Athenian culture, looking back some centuries to-
ward Mitylene, having perspective and a rare standard of
comparison, too, speaks of this *male* woman as among the
wise.

You were the morning star among the living ( the young
Plato, poet and Athenian, wrote of a friend he had lost )
you were the morning star before you died; now you are " as
Hesperus giving, new splendour to the dead. " Plato lives
as a poet, as a lover, though the Republic seems but a ponder-
ous tome and the mysteries of the Dialogues verge often on the
(though there were but a line of her left) roses
didactic and artificial. So Sappho must live, but many roses,
for tradition has set flower upon flower about her name and would
continue to do so though her last line were lost.

Perhaps to Meleager having access to the numberless
rolls of Alexandria, there seemed " but little " though to
us, in a cheerless and more barren age, there seems much.
Legend upon legend has grown up, adding curious documents to
each precious fragment; the history of the preservation of
each line is in itself a most fascinating and bewildering
romance.

Courtezan and woman of fashion were rebuked at one time
for not knowing " even the works of Sappho ". Sophocles
cried out in despair before some inimitable couplet, " gods-
what impassioned heart and longing made this rhythm. " The

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