V.  FRAGMENTS FROM SAPPHO

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LXVIIIFrom Stobaeus, about 500 A. D., as addressed to an uneducated woman. Plutarch quotes the fragments as written to a certain rich lady; but in another work he says the crown of roses was assigned to the Muses, for he remembered Sappho’s having said to some unpolished and uneducated woman these same words. Aristides, about 150 A. D., speaks of Sappho’s boastfully saying to some well-to-do woman, “that the Muses made her blest and worthy of honour, and that she should not die and be forgotten.”

But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall thee be any remembrance of thee then of thereafter, for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades, flitting among the shadowy dead.

In the cold grave where thou shalt lie
All memory too of thee shall die,
Who in this life’s auspicious hours
Disdained Pieria’s genial flowers;
And in the mansions of the dead,
With the vile crowd of ghosts, thy shade,
While nobler spirits point with scorn,
Shall flit neglected and forlorn.

— ?  FELTON.

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Thee too the years shall cover; thou shalt be
As the rose born of one same blood with thee,
As a song sung, as a word said, and fall
Flower-wise, and be not any more at all,
Nor any memory of thee anywhere;
For never Muse has bound above thine hair
The high Pierian flowers whose graft outgrows
All Summer kinship of the mortal rose
And colour of deciduous days, nor shed
Reglex and flush of heaven about thine head.

SWINBURNE, Anactoria.

Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory
       left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never
       didst thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow;
       thy doom
Is writ to flit with unknown ghosts in cold
       and nameless gloom.

EDWIN ARNOLD, 1869.

Yea, thou shalt die,
And lie
    Dumb in the silent tomb;
146 Nor of thy name
Shall there be any fame
    In ages yet to be or years to come:
For of the flowering Rose,
Which on Pieria blows,
    Thou hast no share:
But in sad Hades’ house,
Unknown, inglorious,
    ’Mid the dim shades that wander there
    Shalt thou flit forth and haunt the filmy air.

J. A. SYMONDS, 1883.

When thou fallest in death, dead shalt thou lie,
       nor shall thy memory
Henceforth ever again ever be heard then or
       in days to be,
Since no flowers upon earth ever were thine,
       plucked from Pieria’s spring,
Unknown also ’mid hell’s shadowy throng,
       thou shalt go wandering.

ANON., Love in Idleness, 1883.