No More Learning

It had to endure
the wear and tear of quotation, the commonizing touch of the school and the
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 found you

XXVI I recall thy white gown, cinctured

XXVII Lover, art thou of a surety

XXVIII With your head thrown backward

XXIX Ah, what am I but a torrent

XXX Love shakes my soul, like a mountain wind

XXXI Love, let the wind cry

XXXII Heart of mine, if all the altars

XXXIII Never yet, love, in earth's lifetime

XXXIV "Who was Atthis? " men shall ask

XXXV When the great pink mallow

XXXVI When I pass thy door at night

XXXVII Well I found you in the twilit garden

XXXVIII Will not men remember us

XXXIX I grow weary of the foreign cities

XL Ah, what detains thee, Phaon

XLI Phaon, O my lover

XLII O heart of insatiable longing

XLIII Surely somehow, in some measure

XLIV O but my delicate lover

XLV Softer than the hill-fog to the forest

XLVI I seek and desire

XLVII Like torn sea-kelp in the drift

XLVIII Fine woven purple linen

XLIX When I am home from travel

L When I behold the pharos shine

LI Is the day long

LII Lo, on the distance a dark blue ravine

LIII Art thou the topmost apple

LIV How soon will all my lovely days be over

LV Soul of sorrow, why this weeping?