Anactoria

SAPPHO.

	My life is bitter with thy love; thine eyes
	Blind me, thy tresses burn me, thy sharp sighs
	Divide my flesh and spirit with soft sound,
	And my blood strengthens, and my veins abound.
	I pray thee sigh not, speak not, draw not breath;
	Let life burn down, and dream it is not death.
	I would the sea had hidden us, the fire
	(Wilt thou fear that, and fear not my desire?)
	Severed the bones that bleach, the flesh that cleaves,
10	And let our sifted ashes drop like leaves.
	I feel thy blood against my blood: my pain
	Pains thee, and lips bruise lips, and vein stings vein.
	Let fruit be crushed on fruit, let flower on flower,
	Breast kindle breast, and either burn one hour.
	Why wilt thou follow lesser loves? are thine
	Too weak to bear these hands and lips of mine?
	I charge thee for my life’s sake, O too sweet
	To crush love with thy cruel faultless feet,
	I charge thee keep thy lips from hers or his,
20	Sweetest, till theirs be sweeter than my kiss:
	Lest I too lure, a swallow for a dove,
	Erotion or Erinna to my love.
	I would my love could kill thee; I am satiated
	With seeing thee live, and fain would have thee dead.
	I would earth had thy body as fruit to eat,
	And no mouth but some serpent’s found thee sweet.
	I would find grievous ways to have thee slain,
	Intense device, and superflux of pain;
	Vex thee with amorous agonies, and shake
30	Life at thy lips, and leave it there to ache;
	Strain out thy soul with pangs too soft to kill,
	Intolerable interludes, and infinite ill;
	Relapse and reluctation of the breath,
	Dumb tunes and shuddering semitones of death.
	I am weary of all thy words and soft strange ways,
	Of all love’s fiery nights and all his days,
	And all the broken kisses salt as brine
	That shuddering lips make moist with waterish wine,
	And eyes the bluer for all those hidden hours
40	That pleasure fills with tears and feeds from flowers,
	Fierce at the heart with fire that half comes through,
	But all the flowerlike white stained round with blue;
	The fervent underlid, and that above
	Lifted with laughter or abashed with love;
	Thine amorous girdle, full of thee and fair,
	And leavings of the lilies in thine hair.
	Yea, all sweet words of thine and all thy ways,
	And all the fruit of nights and flower of days,
	And stinging lips wherein the hot sweet brine
50	That Love was born of burns and foams like wine,
	And eyes insatiable of amorous hours,
	Fervent as fire and delicate as flowers,
	Coloured like night at heart, but cloven through
	Like night with flame, dyed round like night with blue,
	Clothed with deep eyelids under and above –
	Yea, all thy beauty sickens me with love;
	Thy girdle empty of thee and now not fair,
	And ruinous lilies in thy languid hair.
	Ah, take no thought for Love’s sake; shall this be,
60	And she who loves thy lover not love thee?
	Sweet soul, sweet mouth of all that laughs and lives,
	Mine is she, very mine; and she forgives.
	For I beheld in sleep the light that is
	In her high place in Paphos, heard the kiss
	Of body and soul that mix with eager tears
	And laughter stinging through the eyes and ears;
	Saw Love, as burning flame from crown to feet,
	Imperishable, upon her storied seat;
	Clear eyelids lifted toward the north and south,
70	A mind of many colours, and a mouth
	Of many tunes and kisses; and she bowed,
	With all her subtle face laughing aloud,
	Bowed down upon me, saying, ‘Who doth thee wrong,
	Sappho?’ but thou – thy body is the song,
	Thy mouth the music; thou art more than I,
	Though my voice die not till the whole world die;
	Though men that hear it madden; though love weep,
	Though nature change, though shame be charmed to sleep.
	Ah, wilt thou slay me lest I kiss thee dead?
80	Yet the queen laughed from her sweet heart and said:
	‘Even she that flies shall follow for thy sake,
	And she shall give thee gifts that would not take,
	Shall kiss that would not kiss thee’ (yea, kiss me)
	‘When thou wouldst not’ – when I would not kiss thee!
	Ah, more to me than all men as thou art,
	Shall not my songs assuage her at the heart?
	Ah, sweet to me as life seems sweet to death,
	Why should her wrath fill thee with fearful breath?
	Nay, sweet, for is she God alone? hath she
90	Made earth and all the centuries of the sea,
	Taught the sun ways to travel, woven most fine
	The moonbeams, shed the starbeams forth as wine,
	Bound with her myrtles, beaten with her rods,
	The young men and the maidens and the gods?
	Have we not lips to love with, eyes for tears,
	And summer and flower of women and of years?
	Stars for the foot of morning, and for noon
	Sunlight, and exaltation of the moon;
	Waters that answer waters, fields that wear
100	Lilies, and languor of the Lesbian air?
	Beyond those flying feet of fluttered doves,
	Are there not other gods for other loves?
	Yea, though she scourge thee, sweetest, for my sake,
	Blossom not thorns and flowers not blood should break.
	Ah that my lips were tuneless lips, but pressed
	To the bruised blossom of thy scourged white breast!
	Ah that my mouth for Muses’ milk were fed
	On the sweet blood thy sweet small wounds had bled!
	That with my tongue I felt them, and could taste
110	The faint flakes from thy bosom to the waist!
	That I could drink thy veins as wine, and eat
	Thy breasts like honey! that from face to feet
	Thy body were abolished and consumed,
	And in my flesh thy very flesh entombed!
	Ah, ah, thy beauty! like a beast it bites,
	Stings like an adder, like an arrow smites.
	Ah sweet, and sweet again, and seven times sweet,
	The paces and the pauses of thy feet!
	Ah sweeter than all sleep or summer air
120	The fallen fillets fragrant from thine hair!
	Yea, though their alien kisses do me wrong,
	Sweeter thy lips than mine with all their song;
	Thy shoulders whiter than a fleece of white,
	And flower-sweet fingers, good to bruise or bite
	As honeycomb of the inmost honey-cells,
	With almond-shaped and roseleaf-coloured shells
	And blood like purple blossom at the tips
	Quivering; and pain made perfect in thy lips
	For my sake when I hurt thee; O that I
130	Durst crush thee out of life with love, and die,
	Die of thy pain and my delight, and be
	Mixed with thy blood and molten into thee!
	Would I not plague thee dying overmuch?
	Would I not hurt thee perfectly? not touch
	Thy pores of sense with torture, and make bright
	Thine eyes with bloodlike tears and grievous light?
	Strike pang from pang as note is struck from note,
	Catch the sob’s middle music in thy throat,
	Take thy limbs living, and new-mould with these
140	A lyre of many faultless agonies?
	Feed thee with fever and famine and fine drouth,
	With perfect pangs convulse thy perfect mouth,
	Make thy life shudder in thee and burn afresh,
	And wring thy very spirit through the flesh?
	Cruel? but love makes all that love him well
	As wise as heaven and crueller than hell.
	Me hath love made more bitter toward thee
	Than death toward man; but were I made as he
	Who hath made all things to break them one by one,
150	If my feet trod upon the stars and sun
	And souls of men as his have alway trod,
	God knows I might be crueller than God.
	For who shall change with prayers or thanksgivings
	The mystery of the cruelty of things?
	Or say what God above all gods and years
	With offering and blood-sacrifice of tears,
	With lamentation from strange lands, from graves
	Where the snake pastures, from scarred mouths of slaves,
	From prison, and from plunging prows of ships
160	Through flamelike foam of the sea’s closing lips –
	With thwartings of strange signs, and wind-blown hair
	Of comets, desolating the dim air,
	When darkness is made fast with seals and bars,
	And fierce reluctance of disastrous stars,
	Eclipse, and sound of shaken hills, and wings
	Darkening, and blind inexpiable things –
	With sorrow of labouring moons, and altering light
	And travail of the planets of the night,
	And weeping of the weary Pleiads seven,
170	Feeds the mute melancholy lust of heaven?
	Is not his incense bitterness, his meat
	Murder? his hidden face and iron feet
	Hath not man known, and felt them on their way
	Threaten and trample all things and every day?
	Hath he not sent us hunger? who hath cursed
	Spirit and flesh with longing? filled with thirst
	Their lips who cried unto him? who bade exceed
	The fervid will, fall short the feeble deed,
	Bade sink the spirit and the flesh aspire,
180	Pain animate the dust of dead desire,
	And life yield up her flower to violent fate?
	Him would I reach, him smite, him desecrate,
	Pierce the cold lips of God with human breath,
	And mix his immortality with death.
	Why hath he made us? what had all we done
	That we should live and loathe the sterile sun,
	And with the moon wax paler as she wanes,
	And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins?
	Thee too the years shall cover; thou shalt be
190	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 flower whose graft outgrows
	All summer kinship of the mortal rose
	And colour of deciduous days, nor shed
	Reflex and flush of heaven about thine head,
	Nor reddened brows made pale by floral grief
200	With splendid shadow from that lordlier leaf.
	Yea, thou shalt be forgotten like spilt wine,
	Except these kisses of my lips on thine
	Brand them with immortality; but me –
	Men shall not see bright fire nor hear the sea,
	Nor mix their hearts with music, nor behold
	Cast forth of heaven, with feet of awful gold
	And plumeless wings that make the bright air blind,
	Lightning, with thunder for a hound behind
	Hunting through fields unfurrowed and unsown,
210	But in the light and laughter, in the moan
	And music, and in grasp of lip and hand
	And shudder of water that makes felt on land
	The immeasurable tremor of all the sea,
	Memories shall mix and metaphors of me.
	Like me shall be the shuddering calm of night,
	When all the winds of the world for pure delight
	Close lips that quiver and fold up wings that ache;
	When nightingales are louder for love’s sake,
	And leaves tremble like lute-strings or like fire;
220	Like me the one star swooning with desire
	Even at the cold lips of the sleepless moon,
	As I at thine; like me the waste white noon,
	Burnt through with barren sunlight; and like me
	The land-stream and the tide-stream in the sea.
	I am sick with time as these with ebb and flow,
	And by the yearning in my veins I know
	The yearning sound of waters; and mine eyes
	Burn as that beamless fire which fills the skies
	With troubled stars and travailing things of flame;
230	And in my heart the grief consuming them
	Labours, and in my veins the thirst of these,
	And all the summer travail of the trees
	And all the winter sickness; and the earth,
	Filled full with deadly works of death and birth,
	Sore spent with hungry lusts of birth and death,
	Has pain like mine in her divided breath;
	Her spring of leaves is barren, and her fruit
	Ashes; her boughs are burdened, and her root
	Fibrous and gnarled with poison; underneath
240	Serpents have gnawn it through with tortuous teeth
	Made sharp upon the bones of all the dead,
	And wild birds rend her branches overhead.
	These, woven as raiment for his word and thought,
	These hath God made, and me as these, and wrought
	Song, and hath lit it at my lips; and me
	Earth shall not gather though she feed on thee.
	As a shed tear shalt thou be shed; but I –
	Lo, earth may labour, men live long and die,
	Years change and stars, and the high God devise
250	New things, and old things wane before his eyes
	Who wields and wrecks them, being more strong than they –
	But, having made me, me he shall not slay.
	Nor slay nor satiate, like those herds of his
	Who laugh and live a little, and their kiss
	Contents them, and their loves are swift and sweet,
	And sure death grasps and gains them with slow feet,
	Love they or hate they, strive or bow their knees –
	And all these end; he hath his will of these.
	Yea, but albeit he slay me, hating me –
260	Albeit he hide me in the deep dear sea
	And cover me with cool wan foam, and ease
	This soul of mine as any soul of these,
	And give me water and great sweet waves, and make
	The very sea’s name lordlier for my sake,
	The whole sea sweeter – albeit I die indeed
	And hide myself and sleep and no man heed,
	Of me the high God hath not all his will.
	Blossom of branches, and on each high hill
	Clean air and wind, and under in clamorous vales
270	Fierce noises of the fiery nightingales,
	Buds burning in the sudden spring like fire,
	The wan washed sand and the waves’ vain desire,
	Sails seen like blown white flowers at sea, and words
	That bring tears swiftest, and long notes of birds
	Violently singing till the whole world sings –
	I Sappho shall be one with all these things,
	With all high things for ever; and my face
	Seen once, my songs once heard in a strange place,
	Cleave to men’s lives, and waste the days thereof
280	With gladness and much sadness and long love.
	Yea, they shall say, earth’s womb has borne in vain
	New things, and never this best thing again;
	Borne days and men, borne fruits and wars and wine,
	Seasons and songs, but no song more like mine.
	And they shall know me as ye who have known me here,
	Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year
	When I love thee; and they shall praise me, and say
	‘She hath all time as all we have our day,
	Shall she not live and have her will’ – even I?
290	Yea, though thou diest, I say I shall not die.
	For these shall give me of their souls, shall give
	Life, and the days and loves wherewith I live,
	Shall quicken me with loving, fill with breath,
	Save me and serve me, strive for me with death.
	Alas, that neither moon nor snow nor dew
	Nor all cold things can purge me wholly through,
	Assuage me nor allay me nor appease,
	Till supreme sleep shall bring me bloodless ease;
	Till time wax faint in all his periods;
300	Till fate undo the bondage of the gods,
	And lay, to slake and satiate me all through,
	Lotus and Lethe on my lips like dew,
	And shed around and over and under me
	Thick darkness and the insuperable sea.