express much the same view in asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's The Great Lover, they declare, cannot be compared with that of his more conventional love poems, simply because the one love is the cause of the other. Such heightened sensuous impressionability is celebrated in much of our most beautiful love poetry of to-day, notably in Sara Teasdale's. It may be that this intensity of perception engendered by love is its most poetical effect. Much verse pictures the poet as a flamelike spirit kindled by love to a preternaturally vivid apprehension of life for an instant, before love dies away, leaving him ashes. Again and again the analogy is pointed out between Shelley's spirit and the leaping flames that consumed his body. Josephine Preston Peabody's interpretation of Marlowe is of the same sort. In the drama of which Marlowe is the titlecharacter, his fellow-dramatist, Lodge, is much worried when he learns of Marlowe's mad passion for a woman of the court. Thou art a glorious madman, Lodge exclaims, Born to consume thyself anon in ashes, Marlowe replies, Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say, What if? I shall have drained my splendor down Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is, Most often this conception of love's flamelike lightening of life for the poet is applied to Sappho. Many modern English poets picture her living “with the swift singing strength of fire."1 Swinburne, in On the Cliffs, claims this as the essential attribute of genius, when he cries to her for sympathy, For all my days as all thy days from birth While day sows night, and night sows day for seed. This intensity of perception is largely the result, or the cause, of the poet's unusually sensitive consciousness of the ephemeralness of love. The notion of permanence often seems to rob love of all its poetical quality. The dark despair engendered by a sense of its transience is needed as a foil to the 1 See Southey, Sappho; Mary Robinson (1758-1800), Sappho and Phaon; Philip Moren Freneau, Monument of Phaon; James Gates Percival, Sappho; Charles Kingsley, Sappho; Lord Houghton, A Dream of Sappho; Swinburne, On the Cliffs, Anactoria, Sapphics; Cale Young Rice, Sappho's Death Song; Sara Teasdale, Sappho; Percy Mackaye, Sappho and Phaon; Zoë Akins, Sappho to a Swallow on the Ground; James B. Kenyon, Phaon Concerning Sappho, Sappho (1920); William Alexander Percy, Sappho in Levkos (1920). fiery splendors of passion. Thus Rupert Brooke, in the sonnet, Mutability, dismisses the Platonic idea of eternal love and beauty, declaring, Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile; Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over; Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile, The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover. Sappho is represented as especially aware of this aspect of her love. Her frenzies in Anactoria, where, if our hypothesis is correct, Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness, arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries, What had all we done That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, 1 Poetry, we are to believe, arises from the yearning to render eternal the fleeting moment of passion. Sappho's poetry is, as Swinburne says, "life everlasting of eternal fire." In Mackaye's Sappho and Phaon, she exults in her power to immortalize her passion, contrasting herself with her mother, the sea: Her ways are birth, fecundity and death, Mine own law will I be! And I will make Creatures of mind and melody, whose forms And joy and aspiration without death. And on the wings of these shall I, I, Sappho! Still soar and sing above these cliffs of Lesbos, Even when ten thousand blooms of men and maidens Are fallen and withered. To one who craves an absolute æsthetic standard, it is satisfactory to note how nearly unanimous our poets are in their portrayal of Sappho.1 This is the more remarkable, since our enormous ignorance of her life and poetry would give almost free scope to inventive faculty. It is significant that none of our writers have been attracted to the picture Welcker gives of her as the respectable matronly head of a girl's seminary. Instead, she is invariably shown as mad with an insatiable yearning, tortured by the conviction that her love can never be satisfied. Charles Kingsley, describing her temperament, Night and day A mighty hunger yearned within her heart, conceives of her much as does Swinburne, who calls her, 1 Love's priestess, mad with pain and joy of song, Song's priestess, mad with pain and joy of love." 'No doubt they are influenced by the glimpse of her given in Longinus, On the Sublime. Sappho. On the Cliffs. It is in this insatiability that Swinburne finds the secret of her genius, as opposed to the meager desires of ordinary folk. Expressing her conception of God, he makes Sappho assert, But having made me, me he shall not slay: It is, no doubt, an inarticulate conviction that she is "imprisoned in the body as in an oyster shell," 1 while the force that is wooing her is outside the boundary of the senses, that accounts for Sappho's agonies of despair. In Sara Teasdale's Sappho she describes herself, Who would run at dusk Along the surges creeping up the shore When tides come in to ease the hungry beach, 1 Plato, Phædrus, § 250. In the end, Sara Teasdale does show her winning content, in the love of her baby daughter, but it is significant that this destroys her lyric gift. She assures Aphrodite, If I sing no more To thee, God's daughter, powerful as God, I taught the world thy music; now alone |