Sapphic Stanza - Use By Other Poets

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).