Sapphics
 

I thought we could start a Sapphic anthology here, for Christine P. and others who might be interested in seeing the form's range of possibilities.

I first encountered Sapphic stanzas in my Sappho and Alcaeus class, in Greek. When I next encountered them, it was here at Eratosphere, and I didn't recognize the form at all, I'm ashamed to say. But I found the combo of the unusual meter and the bizarre dialect of this particular poem to be galvanic:
https://www.ablemuse.com/erato/showp...3&postcount=21
Here's the etching that inspired it:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/338694

Timothy Steele's "Sapphics Against Anger" is often cited as exemplary, and I do enjoy it, but it doesn't always stick to the recipe:
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...-against-anger
Perhaps his occasional substitutions will provide a liberating precedent for those who might otherwise find the form too restrictive.

I'll post other examples separately. Feel free to contribute your own favorites.

˜˜˜˜˜˜
[Edited to add:]

This Musing on Mastery anthology thread is for collecting examples of Sapphics. It is not for discussing the merits or shortcomings of the form.

Yes, there is some debate as to whether Sapphic stanzas really "work" in English, since Sappho's—and the later Latin versions by Catullus, Horace, etc.—were based on the duration of the syllables, rather than being stress-based, as English metered poetry is. I am aware of this. My bachelor's degree was in classical languages, and I've studied Classical Greek and Latin Sapphics in the original languages. (Which, by the way, often break a word across the third and fourth lines. And, as in most other Greek and Latin meters—including Homer's dactylic hexameter—line-ending syllables are scanned as long, regardless of what their quantity actually is.)

I consider English-language, stress-based Sapphics to be their own species, rather than inherently unsuccessful imitations of the original quantitative meter.

Everyone is free to dislike any form for any reason. For example, I am prejudiced against ghazals, because in my experience that form is almost never pulled off in English in a way that ticks all my personal boxes for what I enjoy in a poem. But I don't feel the need to barge into ghazal appreciation parties to piss in the punchbowl by saying so. I wouldn't have the temerity to expect fans of anything to thank me for helping them to stop enjoying it, just because it doesn't have my celebrity endorsement.

Likewise, don't expect form-contemptuous comments to be well-received in this thread. Please feel free to criticize the shortcomings of individual poems posted to it, but spare us sweeping condemnations of the "Meh, I've never been wowed by this form" variety.

I'm reminded of this observation by member David Upton in 2006 (in a General Talk thread titled "Villanelles, Triolets, and Other Crap Forms":

We aren't supposed to resurrect long-dead threads by posting to them after a long period of silence, so perhaps if people want to discuss forms they love to hate, a new General Talk thread could be started for that purpose. Let's keep this one for collecting examples. Thanks.

Maryann Corbett has this gem on p. 68 her Street View (Able Muse Press, 2017), which reminds me that the English word metaphor (from μεταφέρω (metapherō, "to carry over", "to transfer") isn't too far from modern Greek's μεταφορά (metaphōra), which means both "metaphor" and "transportation, carriage, truck,")....

A Morning Myth

Leave the landfill out of it. Leave recycling,
compost, sewage management, land-use planning,
sempiternal plastics. For now, permit me
merely this vision:

draped in easy grace from a groaning trash truck,
down the alley, out of the dawn, Adonis,
charioteer of municipal waste collection,
rides with the morning,

shirtless, buff, and sweaty. Now leaping down, he's
swinging trash bins over the rosy-fingered
smog-haze. Oh, the beautiful arms of heroes!
See, the great vessel,

grinding into motion and spitting gravel,
nears me, while my Attic imagination
costumes all the bodies in breeze-blown chitons.
But—is he looking?

Nope. He's passed, on the flank of the noble mount that
waddles down the potholed macadam, beeping
warnings, with its compactor-innards trailing
stench from the actual

rot that living leaves us. And I, work-suited,
real-life ready, stand in the fragrant wake and
steel myself to toss an apotheosis
out with the garbage.

Maryann also has this one, on p. 46 of Street View:

Teardown

Modest gray two-bedroom. One story. Carport
cobbled to its side like a pasteboard carton.
Patchy lawn, with yellowing arborvitae.
Hulking beside it,

crowding both its flanks, are the great pretenders.
This one, finished, carriage lamps flashing brazen,
hurls its umbrage onto the little rambler.
That one, its dumpsters

bristling broken plywood and torn linoleum,
lumbers upward, loud in a drive of nail guns.
Tyvek sheathing claps in the breeze of April.
These are improvements!

sing the framers, painters, and electricians.
Clear the way for grandness, for granite counters,
flagstone walks and vaulted cathedral ceilings!
Why have I come here,

both my parents dead, and the ticky-tacky
dream they bought for love and eighteen-nine-fifty
cringing in the shadow of greed that shames it?
What was I after?


[The "ticky-tacky" in S5L1 seems to reference to Malvina Reynold's 1967 song, "Little Boxes".]

This one's on p. 30 of Maryann's Credo for the Checkout Line in Winter, also from Able Muse Press (2013). A publisher we are all supporting because it hosts Eratosphere for us. Right? Right? Anyway:

Paint Store

Stand there, stunned and gawking, before these altars,
walls of flapping prayer-flags with names like poems.
What might happen? Glamours and transformations.
Pasts disappearing:

teal, vermilion, ultramarine. You drink them,
suck them in like opiates. Choose them wildly.
Wield them. Then the walls in your head might crack their
cipher of blankness—

Choice, though. Walling in at a single vision.
Sinking in it. Painting it into corners.
Once, you did it: namings and nursery colors.
Emily. Yellow.

Now you think of walk-throughs. Of thinner spirits
shrinking from the force of these saturated
indigos and corals. A sift of ashfall.
Shifting to neutrals,

selling out to selfless release, you settle.
Beige and cream serenity. Light. Satori.
Hand the palette over and stare away to
ceiling-white absence.


The excellent "Weather Radio" on pp. 48-49 of Credo is also in Sapphics.
See also "Tattoo and Piercing Parlor," p. 14 of (Breath Control, David Robert Books, 2012).
"Asparagus," p. 34, "Collision," p. 65; "Iconography," p. 92.

Minutes
by A.E. Stallings

Minutes swarm by, holding their dirty hands out,
Begging change, loose coins of your spare attention,
No one has the currency for them always;
          Most go unnoticed.

Some are selling packets of paper tissues,
Some sell thyme they found growing wild on hillsides,
Some will offer shreds of accordion music,
          Sad and nostalgic.

Some have only cards with implausible stories,
Badly spelled in rickety, limping letters,
"Help me—deaf, etc.—one of seven
          Brothers and sisters."

Others still accost the conspicuous lovers,
Plying flowers looted from cemeteries,
Buds already wilting, though filched from Tuesday's
          Sumptuous funeral.

Who's to say which one of them finally snags you,
One you will remember from all that pass you,
One that makes you fish through your cluttered pockets,
          Costing you something:

Maybe it's the girl with the funeral roses,
Five more left, her last, and you buy the whole lot,
Watching her run skipping away, work over,
          Into the darkness;

Maybe it's the boy with the flute he fashioned
Out of plastic straws, and his strident singing,
Snatches from a melody in a language
          No one can teach you.


pp. 57-58, Hapax (Northwestern University Press, 2006)

Thanks, Julie! “The Morning Myth” is a tour de force! If I ever get to Greece, I’ll be looking for trash metaphors (απορριμματοφόρα). “Wail in Lost Muddle Earth Dialect” is haunting, and the bizarre dialect, whatever it is, somehow captures the macabre “fushiness” of the etching. As a fan of “naïve” questions and “obvious” statements, I’ll point to Swinburne’s majestic “Sapphics”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...-56d224c13e1d5

Thanks for posting the Swinburne, Carl, and glad you enjoyed the others.

Here's one from p. 52 of Matthew Buckley Smith's Dirge for an Imaginary World (winner of the 2011 Able Muse Book Award):

When It Happens

When it happens, nobody seems to notice.
Someone coughs and hammers a nail through drywall.
Boys fling sticks at birds while the church bells tattle.
     Nightfall approaches.

When it happens, dog walkers trail their shadows,
Saving their sacks of waste through the tattered sunset.
Whitened breaths come loose into burnt October,
     Heady as incense.

Someone falters, pushing a drowsy infant
Up the sidewalk, touched by a breeze from childhood
Warm against the cheek as a shower in springtime,
     Full of misgiving...

Just perfumed exhaust from a neighbor's laundry,
Nothing special, nothing to tell the other
Babysitters after the playground's stumbled
     Into the darkness.

When it happens, all of the words are taken.
Those you might have called on, that could have helped you,
Rattle in the gutter on flyers and leaflets
     Selling you something.

Lamps supply each row house's upper windows
Heat enough and light to pretend it's morning.
Night's a looking glass in the fragile instant
     No one is looking.

Summer Sapphics
by Marilyn Taylor

Maybe things are better than we imagine
if a rubber inner-tube still can send us
drifting down a sinuous tree-draped river
               like the Wisconsin —

far removed from spores of touristococcus.
As we bob half-in and half-out of water,
with our legs like tentacles dangling limply
               under the surface

we are like invertibrate creatures, floating
on a cosmic droplet — a caravan of
giant-sized amoebas, without a clear-cut
               sense of direction.

It's as if we've started evolving backwards:
mammal, reptile, polliwog, protozoon —
toward that dark primordial soup we seem so
               eager to get to.

Funny, how warm water will whisper secrets
in its native language to every cell — yet
we, the aggragation, have just begun to
               fathom the gestures.

POETRY, June 1999, p. 142

Richard Lattimore's 1949 metrical translation of "The Anactoria Poem" by Sappho only works if you know where the stresses are supposed to fall, and promote some syllables and elide others, accordingly. "ON the BLACK EARTH IS an ar-RAY of HORSE-men" is not how any other English speaker would read this, nor "IS the LOVE-liest. LIGHT were the WORK to MAKE THIS / PLAIN to ALL.") Anyway:

Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen
on the black earth is an array of horsemen;
some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say
          she whom one loves best

is the loveliest. Light were the work to make this
plain to all, since she, who surpassed in beauty
all mortality, Helen, once forsaking
          her lordly husband,

fled away to Troy-land across the water.
Not the thought of child nor beloved parents
was remembered, after the Queen of Cyprus
          won her at first sight.

Since young brides have hearts that can be persuaded
easily, light things, palpitant to passion
as am I, remembering Anaktória
          who has gone from me

and whose lovely walk and the shining pallor
of her face I would rather see before my
eyes than Lydia's chariots in all their glory
          armored for battle.


I must confess that I've never really understood this poem. Who, other than jerks like Putin and Trump, wouldn't rather see their beloved than a military parade? And wouldn't even those jerks rather see an attractive woman than enemy forces arrayed against them? So even if this is riffing on a then-famous quotation by a conqueror, it seems like a no-brainer. "PLAIN to ALL" indeed.

Julie, thanks for those many shout-outs. Another Spherean who really likes sapphics is Rick Mullin. I've pulled his Coelacanth off the shelf and have already found two of them. Here's the one that's short enough to type:

Sappho's Letter to Sophie

After Picasso's Figures on the Beach, 1931

Darling, since our meeting in Acapulco
I'm a wreck. Your coconut-buttered shoulders,
cockled braids and Louis Vuitton bikini
cover my action

even now! Our Mexican beach encounter
come and gone a year and a half, I'm dying,
lying here, unable to focus, Sophie.
Throw me a lifeline!

No alarm, no casual titillation
pulls me up, engages my soul. I'm even
sleeping through my fiancé's charm offensive.
None of it matters.

Only you, the woman who brushed against me.
You, my fatal island predestination,
rubbed in salt, tequila, and brushing palms of
coconut butter.

I'm off now to see if I can find one I recall by Rhina Espaillat.

It took me all day, but I've found Rhina's sapphics: "Invocation," in the book Where Horizons Go.

Goddess, mother, mentor of those who live to
scribble verses, now in my seventh decade
reaping scanty laurels for minor triumphs,
Muse, I entreat you:

Do not slight me, Lady who never failed me
then, in youth when, stolen from mop and bucket,
merest seconds spent in your rites once brought me
sound of your timbrels.

Image, music, memory, mind's reflection:
let these now, as then, in the freight of each day
seem enough to treasure without betraying
moment to meaning.

Keep me truthful, grant that I never sing it
trendy, bending messages to their hearers,
louder, higher, stranger than speech would have it,
pitching for pennies.

Slap my hand hard, goddess, if once you catch me
reaching out for glory and those Big Prizes;
spare me, after reading the list of winners,
poisonous envy,

rage, excuses, rancorous grief and sniping.
Teach me you are singing in all those voices,
not in this or that one more than another's.
Teach me my one voice;

Teach me to work keeping it just my measure,
narrow, rooted, bound to the gift you lent me,
simple as dirt, useful as broom and ladle,
needle and trowel.

Thank you very much for both of these, Maryann. I somehow don't yet have that book of Rick's, so I'll rectify that!

I failed to mention your humorous riff on Timothy Steele's "Sapphics Against Anger," which might be particularly appreciated by anyone reading this thread for inspiration:

Anger Against Sapphics

               with apologies to Timothy Steele

Dammit. Why is everything always harder
every time I try to use other meters,
striking ones, not regular, plain old iambs?
What is my problem??!!

Iambs flow like cream into morning coffee,
roll like rills of metrical maple syrup.
Why does this feel clotted and unpoetic,
lumpy as oatmeal?

Clomping like a polka with oompah-oompahs,
bumping, banging: That's what a sapphic sounds like,
blaring on and off like a warning buzzer,
never relaxing—

What? You think I'm whining? You think it's easy?
All I have to say to you then is, try it.
There. What's that? You're not having any trouble?
Dammit. I hate you.

Published in Poemeleon


[Julie again:]
BTW, I've published three, but it's very bad form to post one's own work to "Musing on Mastery," so I'll just hastily sneak in these links for those interested:

Terra Firma (please note that I have since become disaffected with this venue)
On Noticing How Many Pro-Life Men Are Smokers
Calendar Girls

I wonder why there's no question about capitalizing Shakespearean and Petrarchan and Spenserian, but Sapphic goes so often uncapitalized. It seems as if what's good for the ganders should be good for the goose.

Sapphics
 

Hi Julie,
Below are four poems in Sapphics that have appeared in three of my books:
From Lines of Flight: Shadow Fish and sub rosa
From Glad and Sorry Seasons: To a Minor Goddess (Poem II from "Two Poems of the Sea"

From Pointing Home: Lessons at Fall Kill Creek


Shadow Fish
Great hoarfrost starsarrive with the shadow fishclearing the path to dawn. – Federico García Lorca, from “Romance sonámbulo”

For the mothers of the disappeared

Here they come, the ravenous sharks of morning,
feasting on the moon and the stars and planets,
swallowing the glimmer of light that’s rising
green in the distance.

Barn owls blink in tacit approval. Cold and
unconcerned, the crickets and frogs keep singing.
Soon the cock will crow, and the fox will charm a
hare from the woodlot.

Far away the five o’clock whistle blasts its
warning at the desolate crossing. Aspens
shiver. Shadow fish are retreating, silver,
dragging you with them.




sub rosa


There were two: shy “Emilie”, quiet “Ellis”.
One assumed a masculine name to mask it;
one dropped sweets and messages in a basket
over the trellis.

Boy or bee, the Belle would take rules and bend them
with her slant on rhythm and rhyme and nectar.
As for Ellis, no one would dare respect her
should she offend them

with a tale of blustering heights of passion
written by a maidenly preacher’s daughter.
One despaired of finding an imprimatur,
wearing an ashen

wardrobe, watching, stitching her words together.
Dreams of Gondal! Dreams of a secret lover!
Still the skittish poet(ess) runs for cover:
birds of a feather

may in mortal fear of the prejudicial,
even now, when tempted to seek admission,
approbation, countenance, recognition,
use the initial.





I. To a Minor Goddess

Wave on wave all heaving and arch and spillage;
blue and green and grey overlaid with silver.
Christmas Day — my saviour the South Atlantic.
Triumph. Surrender.

All my gods have failed me, yet Achelois,
you have watched me wavering in the billows;
you have heard me weeping the wail of seagulls,
and you have answered:

Do not look for eyes in the dancing diamonds;
do not long for lullabies in the breakers;
do not lend more tears to the salt of oceans’
flotsam and jetsam.

Listen for the crash. See the string of seafoam
lace that hems the sand with a hush and whisper.
Silence. Nothing. Everything. Constellations.
Guardian angels.









Lessons at Fall Kill Creek

Altissima quaeque flumina minimo sono labi.
—Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni


I was only five, but I’ve not forgotten.
You and I set off as we do each morning.
Hand in hand, we walk in the April sunshine,
father and first-born.

Halfway to the Samuel Morse School, we would
sometimes stop to see how the creek was faring—
Fall Kill Creek that runs through Poughkeepsie, draining
into the Hudson.

Rain from upstate wetlands and marshes—seeping,
racing southward, coursing through stonewall channels—
forms a perfect habitat for the bluegill,
darter and minnow.

Now we’re at the Catharine Street and Mansion
crossing, looking over the iron railing
at the water, higher than ever, flowing
steady and silent.

Then your quiet words—how it is that stillness
mustn’t be confused with a lack of passion;
why it is that rivulets lead to rivers,
rivers to oceans.

Julie, I copied these from old MS files. I can't seem to get into Edit mode here to correct (1) the missing spaces between words in the epigraphs and the indentation of the fourth line in each stanza. Don't know why I can't edit . . .
Cheers,
Cathy


PS OOPS! Just noted Maryann's calling out as "very bad form" the posting of one's own poems in Musing on Mastery. Boo-hoo. Links aren't any better, IMHO. So, you may delete if you wish.

Hi, Catherine! I don't mind your saving me the trouble of typing these. I'll rebaptize them here, if you want to delete them above, and I will include the note on "To a Minor Goddess." (I've also edited above to indicate that Maryann hadn't made the ungenerous comment about posting one's own work. That was...um...someone else.) A quick PM to Jane Osborn can make your posts above disappear completely, if you like.


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Four poems in Sapphics
by Catherine Chandler

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


Shadow Fish


     Great hoarfrost stars
     arrive with the shadow fish
     clearing the path to dawn.
     —Federico García Lorca, from “Romance sonámbulo”


     For the mothers of the disappeared


Here they come, the ravenous sharks of morning,
feasting on the moon and the stars and planets,
swallowing the glimmer of light that’s rising
     green in the distance.

Barn owls blink in tacit approval. Cold and
unconcerned, the crickets and frogs keep singing.
Soon the cock will crow, and the fox will charm a
     hare from the woodlot.

Far away the five o’clock whistle blasts its
warning at the desolate crossing. Aspens
shiver. Shadow fish are retreating, silver,
     dragging you with them.


From Lines of Flight (Able Muse Press, 2011), p. 5


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


sub rosa


There were two: shy “Emilie”, quiet “Ellis”.
One assumed a masculine name to mask it;
one dropped sweets and messages in a basket
     over the trellis.

Boy or bee, the Belle would take rules and bend them
with her slant on rhythm and rhyme and nectar.
As for Ellis, no one would dare respect her
     should she offend them

with a tale of blustering heights of passion
written by a maidenly preacher’s daughter.
One despaired of finding an imprimatur,
     wearing an ashen

wardrobe, watching, stitching her words together.
Dreams of Gondal! Dreams of a secret lover!
Still the skittish poet(ess) runs for cover:
     birds of a feather

may in mortal fear of the prejudicial,
even now, when tempted to seek admission,
approbation, countenance, recognition,
     use the initial.


From Lines of Flight (Able Muse Press, 2011), p. 37


~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~


To a Minor Goddess

(Poem ii from "Two Poems of the Sea")


Wave on wave all heaving and arch and spillage;
blue and green and grey overlaid with silver.
Christmas Day — my saviour the South Atlantic.
     Triumph. Surrender.

All my gods have failed me, yet Achelois,
you have watched me wavering in the billows;
you have heard me weeping the wail of seagulls,
     and you have answered:

Do not look for eyes in the dancing diamonds;
do not long for lullabies in the breakers;
do not lend more tears to the salt of oceans’
     flotsam and jetsam.

Listen for the crash. See the string of seafoam
lace that hems the sand with a hush and whisper.
Silence. Nothing. Everything. Constellations.
     Guardian angels.


Note: Achelois is a minor Greek moon goddess whose name, translated into English, means "she who washes away pain."


From Glad and Sorry Seasons (Biblioasis, 2014), p. 12


~ ~ ~ ~ ~


Lessons at Fall Kill Creek


     Altissima quaeque flumina minimo sono labi.
     —Quintus Curtius Rufus, Historiae Alexandri Magni


I was only five, but I’ve not forgotten.
You and I set off as we do each morning.
Hand in hand, we walk in the April sunshine,
     father and first-born.

Halfway to the Samuel Morse School, we would
sometimes stop to see how the creek was faring—
Fall Kill Creek that runs through Poughkeepsie, draining
     into the Hudson.

Rain from upstate wetlands and marshes—seeping,
racing southward, coursing through stonewall channels—
forms a perfect habitat for the bluegill,
     darter and minnow.

Now we’re at the Catharine Street and Mansion
crossing, looking over the iron railing
at the water, higher than ever, flowing
     steady and silent.

Then your quiet words—how it is that stillness
mustn’t be confused with a lack of passion;
why it is that rivulets lead to rivers,
     rivers to oceans.


From Pointing Home (Kelsay Books, 2019), p. 23

Here's a Sapphic sonnet by former Sphere member Ray Briggs which was published by Able Muse and appeared in the 2015 Best American Poetry anthology.

Interestingly, the dactyl is sometimes at the 3rd foot, sometimes the 4th.



in the hall of the ruby-throated warbler


Jenny, sunny Jenny, beige-honey Jenny
sings the parsley up from the topsoil, Jenny,
cool tabouleh, hot apple crumble Jenny
alchemy Jenny

please, I whispered, teach me the secret whistle
help me coax the thistledown from the thistle
perch me on the branch where the goldfinch rustles
heedless of bristles

so she bore my heart to the eagle’s aerie
folded me like down in a twig-tight nestle
kissed me till my sinews leapt up cat’s cradle
brain like a beehive

Jenny, downy Jenny, my treetop lover
weave me in your goose feather arms forever

And on the subject of moving dactyls, here's William Meredith's poem, Effort at Speech. Here the dactyl appears anywhere from the first to the fourth foot.

Effort At Speech
For Muriel Rukeyser

Climbing the stairway gray with urban midnight,
Cheerful, venial, ruminating pleasure,
Darkness takes me, an arm around my throat and
Give me your wallet.

Fearing cowardice more than other terrors,
Angry I wrestle with my unseen partner,
Caught in a ritual not of our making,
panting like spaniels.

Bold with adrenaline, mindless, shaking,
God damn it, no! I rasp at him behind me,
Wrenching the leather from his grasp. It
breaks like a wishbone,

So that departing (routed by my shouting,
not by my strength or inadvertent courage)
Half the papers lending me a name are
gone with him nameless.

Only now turning, I see a tall boy running,
Fifteen, sixteen, dressed thinly for the weather.
Reaching the streetlight he turns a brown face briefly
phrased like a question.

I like a questioner watch him turn the corner
Taking the answer with him, or his half of it.
Loneliness, not a sensible emotion,
breathes hard on the stairway.

Walking homeward I fraternize with shadows,
Zigzagging with them where they flee the streetlights,
Asking for trouble, asking for the message
trouble had sent me.

All fall down has been scribbled on the street in
Garbage and excrement: so much for the vision
Others taunt me with, my untimely humor,
so much for cheerfulness.

Next time don't wrangle, give the boy the money,
Call across chasms what the world you know is.
Luckless and lied to, how can a child master
human decorum?

Next time a switchblade, somewhere he is thinking,
I should have killed him and took the lousy wallet.
Reading my cards he feels a surge of anger
blind as my shame.

Error from Babel mutters in the places,
Cities apart, where now we word our failures:
Hatred and guilt have left us without language
that might have led to discourse

Thank you for these, Matt, and I apologize for not saying so sooner. Very helpful to have your observations on those traveling dactyls.

This is by Geoffrey Hill, from many Sapphics to choose from in this part of his sequence "The Daybooks" (Odi Barbare, 2012). I find it hilarious (Hillarious?) that in S2L1 he mentions Google, since I had already resorted to it twice by then in this section.

XXXI

Ghelderode's price here or the cost of Ensor.
Bloated Eros, your pain-extended body,
Jerked abroad scar-angry, a coarse cadaver
          Wired to a fine art.

Google my old blind of Platonics with Mc-
Taggart's mystic corpulence deemed endearing.
Sentiment grown wholly at one with logic,
          Durance feints passes.

Nobbled rhetor cleared but as aberration,
Scarcely gauge what skin I would have you shed here.
Rhetor not slave killer with net and trident
          Though it could well be.

So Petrarca, prego Madonna prego;
Wear dark glasses we must protect the sun. This
When in some sense naked desire's upon us
          Let us defer to.

Beggars' clay bowls ample for what was given,
I remember also Tagore's ecstatic
Mornings, all that rhapsody tuned by rapt strings,
          Shantineketan.

Given your pledge I would commute to service
Vessels once fit only for salvage bear my,
Our, libations fructile towards the altar
          Stone of this strophe.

My translation of Catullus 51 and Sappho 31

Duncan

Sara Teasdale
 

Apologies if this has been posted above, and also if it's not kosher to revive this thread, but this poem is new to me this morning: "September Midnight" by Sara Teasdale. Lots of variation from the metrical standard!

Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer,
Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing,
Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects,
Ceaseless, insistent.

The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples,
The wheel of a locust leisurely grinding the silence
Under a moon waning and worn, broken,
Tired with summer.

Let me remember you, voices of little insects,
Weeds in the moonlight, fields that are tangled with asters,
Let me remember, soon will the winter be on us,
Snow-hushed and heavy.

Over my soul murmur your mute benediction,
While I gaze, O fields that rest after harvest,
As those who part look long in the eyes they lean to,
Lest they forget them.

I'm going to plug this one of mine that appeared in Lavender Review. I think of it as one of my best.

Still Life with Rose in a Crystal Vase

But all this must be suffered by those who profess
the stern order of chivalry. ~Cervantes

Feeling all the butterfly years, the seven
rays of windowed solitude in Manhattan
settle on your shoulders about the kitchen,
wouldn’t you call me?

Surely I’m the confidant you’d remember.
One whose shattered letters and hidden poems
light the detailed minutes of furtive meetings.
Haven’t I told you

how your West Side garret by day disguises
earthly flesh in shadows that hold no value
set against the elegant moon that waxes
into the morning?

How I see you lingering at the table,
face and hands composed in a Goya etching?
How my heart inclines in a thorny tangle,
bleeding in doorways?

No. This heart shall never unwind its rose of
fifteen years, its labyrinth of devotion,
hands that fold and lips that maintain their rigor,
always this yearning.

Nor could I dismantle the love that anchors
worlds within the chrysalis of my armor,
thunder in the beautiful code of silence
cut from the garden.

Seeing how a dream will unfold like petals,
might we say our time is a mist that rises?
Might the truth arrive in a masque of madness
carrying flowers?

.

That's beautiful, Rick. Thanks for sharing.

I don't think that most Sapphic poetry even works in English. I think Greek meter broadly does not play well with how we use this language. English uses syllable stress and has very rigid rules on how to apply it. Greek uses syllable length and has much less restricting rules.

No one cares what you think.

Using a form developed in another language and culture can be as much an act of translation as, well, translation. It requires adaptation. I recently translated a French poem in which the final quatrain used two pairs of homonyms as its end-rhymes; there was no way to use those words and keep the rhyme scheme, since in English none of the four words are homonyms for each other. The same thing can happen with form. Japanese syllable counts don't work the same way that English syllable counts do... but we still write haiku.

In English, Sapphic poems do use a set metre based on stresses, namely three lines where the pattern is trochee, trochee, dactyl, trochee, trochee followed by a shorter line (dactyl, trochee) to end each quatrain. (There can be some variation in where the dactyl falls in the first three lines.) Does it work the same way as in Greek? No. Is it still a recognizable translation of the form, one that works in its new setting? Yes.

You posted your comment in a thread that contains 2+ pages of English-language Sapphic poems. Which did you read? Which did you like? Which do you think don't work?

Maybe it's I just find the use of modern imagery with ancient meter jarring. I don't like writing and using that sort of reference, so perhaps that's the key annoyance for me. I already figured out my preference for archaism makes me an outlier here.

If you're an outlier, you don't have to show up here to say so. You'd make the point better by staying away while the inliers harmlessly indulge their foolishness.

Dude, if you don't like me. Ignore me.

It's hard to annoy or ignore you when (a) you put up a series of silly and self-involved posts, and (b) there is no indication that you've ever published anything, and (c) you blah-blah-blah, but have yet to post a poem you've written. Stop strutting, and post a poem.

N, or should I call you dude? Anyway, this thread was started so that people who enjoy Sapphics can share their favorites. Many poems have been posted here, several of them written by members of the Eratosphere community. Then you show up, someone no one here knows, and proclaim that Sapphics do not work in English, implying quite strongly that all of the poems posted to this thread by your fellow Sphere members are complete failures, and everyone else has a tin ear because they mistakenly feel otherwise.

I have an idea. Why not find a forum for people who grow roses so you can explain to them that you believe roses are a substandard flower? As you did here, don't identify yourself. Just be the mysterious figure who stops by to tell everyone else they are wasting their time cultivating a flower that someone named "N" doesn't care for.

Alternatively, you can approach this board with the attitude that there are people here who know as much as you do, who are more accomplished than you are, and who don't need lectures from you about quantitative and qualitative meter. We get it, you read a book, or part of one. But everyone here has already read the same book, so you'll do better at the Sphere if you think of yourself as a student as well as a teacher (the way everyone else does). If you used this thread as an opportunity to revisit Sapphics and try to find out what you have been missing, maybe you would have ended up changing your mind, or altering your views slightly. Maybe not, but at least you might have shown the people here the respect to give it a try rather than just showing up to announce your verdict and to imply that everyone else on the thread lacks the nuanced ear for meter that you seem to think you possess.

I'd like the 'Sphere to be more welcoming than this.

Posting poems is a good way of helping Spherians get to know you, but it shouldn't be a prerequisite for participation. I hope the Sphere can welcome thoughts about poetry, even if they come from non-poets (which Matheson may or may not be).

That's not true. I, for one, would be interested in hearing a response to Christine's request that Matheson apply the opinion shared to one or more of the poems posted.

We should discourage empty bloviating (a harsh description of Matheson's reasonably phrased opinion), but Christine's approach--to ask for something more rigorous--is better than rudeness.

Sorry, Max, but I don't need lessons from you on how to address N.

Thanks. But I don't think it makes much of a difference.

I agree. And I don't think has been one of the 'Sphere's finest hours.

Just my opinion from the edge.

I'd like to post a poem and asked to do so, but my critiques were not seen as enough.

I've welcomed literally hundreds of people at the Sphere, but I don't welcome trolls. If you haven't picked up on what we're dealing with here, your Spidey sense may need a tune-up.

Don’t be bullied off the Sphere. Shit sometimes flies, but I can tell you from personal experience that it’s perfectly safe and a good opportunity to toughen your hide. Do leave if you honestly believe there’s nothing for you here. It’s not for everyone.

Thanks. I appreciate it. I am considering leaving. I am NOT a troll, but if people think I am, I don't see much point in sticking around.

The reason you weren't allowed to post is that the guidelines (have you read them?) clearly state that a new member has to post 15 critiques before putting up their own poem for critique. The has been in effect for many years, and it works well - it discourages the phonies and egotists who post their own poems, but can't be bothered critiquing any. A quick count indicates you only have 12 critiques. Post three more, and as far as I can see you're ready to put up a poem. And don't complain about not being allowed to join the club when you can't be bothered to follow the club rules.

I'm not bullying anyone, Carl. I never asked him to leave. I faulted him for showing up on a Sapphics appreciation thread to say that all the poems that people selected as their favorites, including poems that they themselves had written, weren't just bad, but that their authors had wasted their time because (as they should have known) you can't write good Sapphics in English. Again, it's like showing up at a club for rose enthusiasts to tell them roses actually smell bad and cannot be grown successfully. If you feel that way, don't join the club.

But fine. If I've been too hard on him, I will back off and watch from the sidelines as the rest of you politely engage. We'll see how that works out.