“O, ruby-flushed and flaring gold, Thou splendid lone one left for me, Apple of love to filch and hold, Fruit-glory of a kingly tree! Drop, drop into my hand, That I may hide thee in my breast, And bear thee far o’er sea and land, A captive, to the purple West.” Renée Vivien (1877-1909), an American poetess of great promise who died all too young and all too unknown to students of Sappho (see bibliography), made some very nice French verse translations of Sappho which were published under a pseudonym in 1903 and reprinted anonymously in 1909. She pays her tribute to Sappho in these two verses: Les siècles attentifs se penchent pour entendre Les lambeaux de tes chants.... The Maryland poet, Father John B. Tabb, the only American who with Emerson was admitted to the Oxford _Garland Series on Epigrams_, has two poems on Sappho, in the first of which Keats is appropriately classed with Sappho:[183] KEATS—SAPPHO Methinks, when first the nightingale Was mated to thy deathless song, That Sappho with emotion pale, Amid the Olympian throng, Again, as in the Lesbian grove, Stood listening with lips apart, To hear in thy melodious love The pantings of her heart. SAPPHO A light upon the headland, flaming far, We see thee o’er the widening waves of time, Impassioned as a palpitating star, Big with prophetic destiny sublime: A momentary flash—a burst of song— Then silence, and a withering blank of pain. We wait, alas! in tedious vigils long, The meteor-gleam that cometh not again! Our eyes are heavy, and our visage wan: Our breath—a phantom of the darkness—glides Ghostlike to swell the dismal caravan Of shadows, where thy lingering splendor hides, Till, with our tears and ineffectual sighs, We quench the spark a smouldering hope supplies. We have already referred to Alan Seeger’s use of the famous midnight fragment (p. 78). The magazines are fond of the subject of Sappho and Phaon and have countless poems which refer to Phaon and the Leucadian Leap. Buchanan has a poem called _The Leucadian Rock_; and Edward J. O’Brien in the _Liberator_ says: Stir not the grasses here, O wandering zephyr, For Phaon travelled far over alien foam Before his footsteps turned in soft contentment Home to the green threshold He had forgotten. Sara Teasdale, the modern burning American Sappho, has a poem on _Phaon and the Leucadian Leap_ in _Scribner’s Magazine_, for December, 1913, pp. 725-6. The poem is too long to quote entire, and I can give only a few lines: