Sappho (48 page)

And she turned to Khar; she could always turn to Khar because they had shared an exile. “Khar, the Moon is white in a sky that still belongs to Day, and neither the dead nor the living can I shake from my head. They climb with me, even Alkaios, a young Alkaios full of pranks.” She was young, too. She smiled indulgently at the young Sappho, the young Alkaios.

The last few paces were a scramble. She stood breathless at the summit. Far beneath, breaking white at the base of the cliff, Sea sent up spume.

Sappho knelt at Apollo's shrine, among the broken columns, and laid there the tattered roses that had survived the winds. There were no other offerings. None had recently passed this way.

She addressed the rock-throned god: “You see before you, O healer, a woman. A poet … but a woman. Until this moment I thought I came in pursuit of love. But since you are a god and know all, you know it is a vain and foolish quest.”

She hummed a moment, a snatch of song, for her Way-Muses were with her. “I had a youth so full by day and night of delicate and dainty things, of dear loves and fair companions. And ever at my side the slender-ankled maidens. O my hetaerae, toward you this heart of mine will never change.

“Why am I here at your feet on this unlikely height?” she asked the god. “Phaon at the last opened his eyes and looked me in the face, and what he saw I do not wish to know. But I am not here because of Phaon. I am here because I cannot go forward and I cannot go back.” She smiled at the weathered god as she had smiled at Khar, it was a big sister smile. “We are wrong, I think, to envy the immortals. You must grow very weary.”

Slowly she stood and began to sing:

They say that Leda once

found hidden an egg

of hyacinth color

Atthis, I loved you long ago,

when my own girlhood was still all flowers

Earth of the many chaplets

puts on her embroidery

Love coming from Heaven

throws off his purple mantle

She wandered to the very edge of the precipice, drawn there step by step. From this distance, the billows seemed comfortable. The rocks could not be seen:

I shall put you to rest

on soft cushions.

You shall lie

on cushions new

She raised her arms. There were no birds on her shoulders. But winged words of many loves and many garlands woven held her a moment.

Sappho was surrounded by fair companions. She reached out to the unlimited.

Yet I could not expect to touch Heaven

with my two arms

She took one step more over air, calling to her nine sisters:

I long and I yearn

Rushing through vast air to a new exile, a new freedom, she was Sappho.

Someone hereafter, I tell you

will remember—

*   *   *

Crafts of all sizes, from small fishing boats to Kharaxos's and Sappho's own fleets, dredged as close as they dared to the awesome white Leucadian cliff against which Poseidon spewed his might. Silent slaves, fishermen, and young sponge divers with the grace of an Apollo or a Dionysos sprang again and again into the black waters. They were casting with nets.

On the shore Kharaxos walked with Alkaios. Alkaios was sobbing, Khar's face was ashen as the cliff and looked carved from it. “If you love me, do not speak to me more, for I killed her. I sent her on this mad chase that has ended here. In love myself, I had no pity for her love, that last desperate flaring up. She would have shortly seen … but I drove the boy away.”

Alkaios sank deeper into misery, nor did he try to comfort his friend. Some ills there are that may not be cured. They walked the small crescent of sand shore in silence and retraced their steps under the high, commanding granite.

A sudden shout went up.

“They've found her!” Khar said.

A light boat was rowed in and beached. A diver, dripping water, lifted the small body ashore. Her brother and Alkaios approached and looked. Every bone was smashed so that the skin was no more than a sack for the pieces. A blanket was placed on the sand and the remains put into it. Khar knelt and tried to make an outline with the semblance of human form, but he could not even set the limbs straight. “Those awful virgins, the Gray Women, know I did not mean this. I swear by all the gods that be, I would give up everything, Doricha, anything at all, to have you breathe your grace upon me.” He abandoned his effort to smooth the rubble under the skin and looked distractedly at Alkaios.

His friend's hand fell heavily to his shoulder. “I tell you this: Time will not break the meshes of her greatness.”

What seemed to comfort Alkaios, comforted Khar not at all. He turned again to the pitiful heap that, except for the raven hair with its white streak, was unrecognizable. What he saw was another time and another Sappho. With an iron knife he cut a lock of hair as dark as hers and commingled them. “Voyage with a fair breeze, Little Pebble.”

Alkaios continued staring at what had been Sappho of the violet tresses. “Not all the streams of all the rivers that flow below and on Earth can wash away this life.” He cut a lock of his own gray curls, as Khar had done, and laid it upon her.

A bowed form of an old woman wrapped in a mantle the color of the sand shore, moved. It was almost as though one of the rocks on the beach moved. Niobe walked to the blanket and stood looking down at her mistress. “You told me, Lady, to accompany you in this exile.” And before any knew what she would do, thrust a knife deep in her bowels.

Her corpse was laid respectfully at the feet of the poet.

Alkaios began a dirge, his voice stumbling so that only some of the words were heard, although the cadence was felt. Rough sailors who had lent their help in recovering the body of Sappho of Lesbos stood and wept and tried to hear Alkaios's ode:

… Misfortune …

a sharer in sorrows …

Khar's tears fell on the misshapen bundle at his feet, and he tore his clothes. Alkaios went on:

… for the incurable decline of life is at hand but

panic springs up in the terror-stricken breast of the

hart … maidens … ruin … the coldness of sea

waves …

The funeral chant ceased, but no one moved. They remained frozen in attitudes of grief and desolation as though they had been mourning figures captured on a temple frieze or on a black vase.

At last from the crowd a gnarled, weathered fisherman stepped forward. He had foraged a little way up the trail that led to Apollo's shrine and found wild roses growing in a declivity between sand and stone. With coarse, reddened hands he laid them on Sappho's distorted form, and in the soft Lesbian accent said simply:

Though few

they are roses

 

 

Grateful acknowledgment is given for the permission to reprint selections of Sappho's poetry from the following authors, translators, and publishers:

Willis Barnstone:
Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets.
Copyright ©1998, Schocken Books. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Mary Bernard:
Sappho.
Copyright ©1994, Shambhala Publications Inc. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Guy Davenport:
Archilochus Sappho Alkman.
Copyright ©1980, University of California Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Jeffrey M. Duban:
Ancient and Modern Images of Sappho.
Copyright ©1983, University Press of America. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Suzy Q. Groden:
The Poems of Sappho.
Copyright ©1966, The Bobbs-Merrill Company. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Jim Powell:
Sappho: A Garland.
Copyright ©1993, The Noonday Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Beram Saklatvala:
Sappho of Lesbos: Her Works Restored.
Copyright ©1968, Charles Skilton Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Jane McIntosh Snyder:
Lesbian Desire in the Lyrics of Sappho.
Copyright ©1997, Columbia University Press. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

Arthur Weigall:
Sappho of Lesbos.
Copyright ©1932, Frederick A. Stokes Co. Reprinted by permission of the publisher.

 

SAPPHO: THE TENTH MUSE
. Copyright © 1998 by Nancy Freedman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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ISBN 0-312-18660-6

First Edition: July 1998

eISBN 9781466885578

First eBook edition: October 2014