Sappho from her tender years was inured to the sorrows as well as the joys of love. Two of her fragments (E. 111, 135), the first perhaps a complete poem, represent the loneliness of a long night spent in vain waiting for a lover. Cipollini (1890) and others have often set these to music. They are popular ballads which Sappho must have used just as Burns did in writing _Auld Lang Syne_. As Tucker says: “It is probable that she is setting one such prehistoric lyrical idea to new words or recasting one such vagrom ditty.” He is thinking, I imagine, of such a Scottish ballad as: Yestreen I made my bed fu’ brade The night I’ll make it narrow: For a’ the livelong winter’s night I’ll lie twin’d of my marrow. There are a score of versions in Italian, some far from Sappho, and Ronsard’s good French version; and many an American or English poet has tried his hand at translating the lines,[94] which in the Greek toll like a curfew bell. All too little known is the rendering by Alan Seeger, the poet who was killed in battle on July 4, 1916, in his poem, _Do You Remember Once?_ Under the western-seas The pale moon settles and the Pleiades. The firelight sinks: outside the night-winds moan— The hour advances, and I sleep alone. For the Greek silence of nature Seeger substitutes the sympathy of nature in the moaning of the night winds. A more literal translation is: Sunk is the moon The Pleiades are set; Tis midnight; soon The hour is past: and yet I lie alone— (TUCKER) Sappho’s verses are purer, simpler than the frank poem of Hester Bancroft on an _August Night_:[95] God, the night will never end And I, alone discordant and forlorn, Unmated, on this love-night of the year! The other popular song about a girl in love, in a metre which Horace imitated in the twelfth ode of the third book, is as imaginative a description as anything in Coleridge or Keats with whom the Maryland poet, Father Tabb, so aptly compares Sappho. It reminds one of Gretchen’s weaving-song in _Faust_, and of the English folk-song, “O mother, put my wheel away; I cannot spin to-night.” It is beautifully translated by Thomas Moore, in his _Evenings in Greece_: [As o’er her loom the Lesbian maid In love-sick languor hung her head, Unknowing where her fingers strayed, She weeping turned away, and said,] ‘Oh, my sweet mother, ’tis in vain, I cannot weave, as once I wove, So wildered is my heart and brain With thinking of that youth I love.’