Here are two late-Victorian sapphics from Canadian authors. The second is pretty dreadful, but interesting in its attempt to add rhyme to the form. The first is much better poetry, however, and it aims toward the lining-up of accent and quantity that I think an English sapphic demands.
Archibald Lampman
SAPPHICS
Clothed in splendour, beautifully sad and silent,
Comes the autumn over the woods and highlands,
Golden, rose-red, full of divine remembrance,
Full of foreboding.
Soon the maples, soon will the glowing birches,
Stripped of all that summer and love had dowered them,
Dream, sad-limbed, beholding their pomp and treasure
Ruthlessly scattered:
Yet they quail not: Winter with wind and iron
Comes and finds them silent and uncomplaining,
Finds them tameless, beautiful still and gracious,
Gravely enduring.
Me too: changes, bitter and full of evil,
Dream by dream have plundered and left me naked,
Grey with sorrow. Even the days before me
Fade into twilight,
Mute and barren. Yet will I keep my spirit
Clear and valiant, brother to these my noble
Elms and maples, utterly grave and fearless,
Grandly ungrieving.
Brief the span is, counting the years of mortals,
Strange and sad; it passes, and then the bright earth,
Careless mother, gleaming with gold and azure,
Lovely with blossoms—
Shining white anemones, mixed with roses,
Daisies mild-eyed, grasses and honeyed clover—
You, and me, and all of us, met and equal,
Softly shall cover.
-------------------------------------------
Charles G.D. Roberts
MIRIAM.—I: SAPPHICS
Miriam, loved one, were thy goings weary?
Journeyed not with thee one to brighten thy way?
Lighted with love-light how could it be dreary?
Was it not my way?
Why wert thou weary? All the golden glories
Streaming from love’s lamp thy enraptured sight won;
Sweetly we whispered old self-heroed stories,
Miriam, bright one!
Crimson lipp’d love-flowers sprang about us going,
Clustering closely, rosy shadows weaving;
Straight from our footsteps glowing ways were flowing,
Vistas far-cleaving.
Silvery lute-notes thrilled athrough the noonlight,
Flutings of bird-throats light as flight of swallow;
Scents rose around us thick as in the moonlight
Leaves fall and follow.
How could I dream that thou wert growing weary?
Never I guessed it till I saw thee fading;
Saw thee slip from me,—and my way fell dreary.
Cease thine upbraiding!
Cease thine upbraiding, ah, my widowed spirit!
Trace on thy path by rays from backward sight won.
More than I gave thee the bliss thou dost inherit,
Miriam, bright one!
[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited July 07, 2004).]
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