These last lines suggest, what many poets have asserted, that the goddess of beauty is apt to change her habitation from one clay to another, and that the poet who clings to the fair form after she has departed, is nauseated by the dead bones which he clasps. [Footnote: See Thomas Hardy's novel, _The Well Beloved_.] This theme Rupert Brooke is constantly harping upon, notably in _Dead Men's Love_, which begins, There was a damned successful poet, There was a woman like the Sun. And they were dead. They did not know it. They did not know his hymns Were silence; and her limbs That had served love so well, Dust, and a filthy smell. The feeling that Aphrodite is leading them a merry chase through manyforms is characteristic of our ultra-modern poets, who anticipate at least one new love affair a year. Most elegantly Ezra Pound expresses his feeling that it is time to move on to a fresh inspiration: As a bathtub lined with white porcelain When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,-- So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion, My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady. As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's _Anactoria_ Sappho compares her sensations Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year When I love thee. In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love of the poetess, she asserts of herself, I doubt if ever she saw form of man Or maiden either whom, being beautiful, She hath not loved. When Alcaeus protests, "But not with passion!" she rejoins, All That breathes to her is passion, love itself All passionate. The inevitability of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines wherein she dismisses those who gossip about her: