[Rick Mullin]

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?

.

[Christine P'legion]

That's beautiful, Rick. Thanks for sharing.

[N. Matheson]

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.

[Roger Slater]

No one cares what you think.

[Christine P'legion]

Originally Posted by N. Matheson

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.

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?

[N. Matheson]

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.

[Roger Slater]

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.

[N. Matheson]

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

[Michael Cantor]

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.

[Roger Slater]

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.