Use By Other Poets
Sappho's contemporary and countryman, Alcaeus of Mytilene, also used the Sapphic stanza.
A few centuries later, the Roman poet Catullus admired Sappho's work and used the Sapphic meter in two poems, Catullus 11 and Catullus 51. The latter is a rough translation of Sappho 31. Sapphics were also used by Horace in several of his Odes, including Ode 1.22:
- Integer uitae scelerisque purus
- non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu
- nec uenenatis grauida sagittis,
- Fusce, pharetra...
- (The man who is upright in life and free
- of wickedness, he needs no Moorish spears
- nor bow nor quiver heavy with envenomed
- arrows, Fuscus...)
The Sapphic stanza was imitated in English by Algernon Charles Swinburne in a poem he simply called Sapphics:
- So the goddess fled from her place, with awful
- Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;
- While behind a clamour of singing women
- Severed the twilight.
Thomas Hardy chose to open his first verse collection Wessex Poems and other verses 1898 with "The Temporary the All," a poem in Sapphics, perhaps as a declaration of his skill and as an encapsulation of his personal experience.
- Change and chancefulness in my flowering youthtime,
- Set me sun by sun near to one unchosen;
- Wrought us fellowly, and despite divergence,
- Friends interblent us.
Rudyard Kipling wrote a fine tribute to William Shakespeare in Sapphics called "The Craftsman", beginning:
- Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid,
- He to the overbearing Boanerges
- Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor
- Blessed be the vintage!)
Allen Ginsberg also experimented with the form:
- Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet mouthed
- under Boulder coverlets winter springtime
- hug me naked laughing & telling girl friends
- gossip til autumn
Isaac Watts penned "The Day of Judgment" subtitled An Ode Attempted in English Sapphic (here are the third and fourth stanzas):
- Such shall the noise be and the wild disorder,
- (If things eternal may be like these earthly)
- Such the dire terror, when the great Archangel
- Shakes the creation,
- Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heaven,
- Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes;
- See the graves open, and the bones arising,
- Flames all around 'em!
Australian Classicist and poet John Lee wrote a Sapphic stanza about the impossibility of writing Sapphic stanzas in English:
- Making Sapphics isn't that easy, shackling
- Our reluctant language with trochees. Since you
- First begot them, songstress of Lesbos, keep them.
- I'll never write them.
(the poem exist also in Latin version).
Read more about this topic: Sapphic Stanza
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