[In the following essay, Gregory explores the poetry of Sappho in terms of its influence on Hilda Doolittle, characterizing the Greek poet's work as “the timeless matter of ephemeral feeling.”]

If we accept Sappho as a great erotic poet, Paul Friedrich suggests, “then her body becomes an icon for a myth of the inner life” (113). What are the contours of the myth seen through this female “body” of language? What is that interior landscape of Lesbos, and how is it present in H.D.'s Sea Garden? I would like to evoke Sappho herself, as her poetry—in translation—can render her presence, and to evoke as well H.D.'s Sappho. H.D.'s specific meditation on the Greek poet, recently published as “The Wise Sappho,” has great resonance in the world of Sea Garden.¹ Here H.D. shows keen awareness of Sappho's poetry, and at the same time sees the Greek poet through the lens of her own alienation from the island and her longing as lover and poet for such a place.

Perhaps the most remarkable quality of Sappho's imagined Lesbos is the “liminality,” the threshold quality, of its central mysteries, all of which reflect the goddess Aphrodite whom Sappho both serves and embodies in song.² Aphrodite's theophany occurs within mood, in the state of aphrodite, an interiorized quality of feeling indistinguishable from the numinous presence of the goddess herself (Friedrich 97, 124). Aphrodite dissolves boundaries between inner and outer, between self and other. In the same way the central values of Sappho's world are at once deeply subjective and radically impersonal (god-given); they represent a deep interiority infusing an outward shape or motion, making it vibrant and golden. The quality of grace, or charis, which the goddess and the poet cultivate, is a refined excellence at the center of life, a revelation, through one's whole presence—in movement, speech, action—that one shares in the life of the gods (Friedrich 106-7). A similar quality of exquisiteness (habrosune) is the very texture of aphroditic/sapphic vision (Friedrich 122-23). Sappho says in one fragment (Lobel and Page no. “58”), “But I love [the exquisite], … this, and yearning for the sun has won me Brightness and Beauty” (trans. Nagy 176). This delicacy and refinement, like the quality of grace, is present both in the outward richness of the other and in the vision that endows it with beauty. Aphrodite stands within and between seer and seen, speaker and spoken, giver and given. And the poet through the liminal rite of the poem makes the moment of her theophany a communal event.

One Sapphic fragment especially points to the nature of Aphrodite and to some of the images surrounding her. In fragment “LP 2,” Sappho summons Aphrodite to come to a sacred grove and participate in ritual festivities in her honor:³

You know the place: then
Leave Crete and come to us
waiting where the grove is
pleasantest, by precincts
sacred to you; incense
smokes on the altar, cold
streams murmur through the
apple branches, a young
rose thicket shades the ground
and quivering leaves pour
down deep sleep; in meadows
where horses have grown sleek
among spring flowers, dill
scents the air. Queen! Cyprian!
Fill our gold cups with love
stirred into clear nectar

Sappho invokes the goddess to leave her island and come to this intimate place; but the sensuous, incantatory poem itself manifests her presence. For both Aphrodite and poetry have each the power of thelxis, enchantment, manifest in bodily response (Segal 144). In the erotic charm of the poet's language, Aphrodite enters the body and soul, awakening the motions of desire. The rich and dense fragrance of frankincense mingles with the delicate odors of flowers, and the murmur of cold water through graceful trees blends with the exquisite shadowing of roses. This complex heightening of senses is climaxed, when from quivering leaves—kindled and alive, as are body and vision too—a koma, an enchanted sleep, descends. The spell complete, the entranced eyes open to the larger animation of burgeoning spring, to feeding horses, to a meadow of blossoms, through which move refreshing breezes. When Sappho calls, finally, “Queen! Cyprian! / Fill our gold cups with love / stirred into clear nectar,” the goddess is with these words no longer latent but suddenly manifest. Having already awakened the suppliant to the fresh yet erotically charged life within her presence, she crowns the moment as Divine Queen. As if among the imperishable gods, she pours out into gold cups immortal nectar mingled with the lucid joy of this consummated mortal rite.

What is this rite, and where does it take place? An altar has been prepared, and perhaps a feast as well, but no one is present; nothing is present except the longing voice of Sappho and the images by which she gives body to longing. This sacred place where the goddess enters is intimate and interior: it is, Thomas McEvilley suggests, “the imagination of the poet, the grove of transformations in which visions are seen and the breaches in reality are healed.” Moreover, the “sacred grove” is the poem itself, creating in the reader through the speech of the poet “the trance of paradise” in which the goddess is entertained (“Fragment Two” 332-33).

This poem also suggests a set of images that are central to Sappho's world. One of these is the spatial image of a “private space.” Lesbos itself—or Sappho's thiasos or group of young girls—is such an insular space, a liminal “island” set apart from ordinary life, within which a ritual passage is experienced.⁴ But there are still other distinct spaces within the daily life of the thiasos, Eva Stehle Stigers says, such as the “invisible bond or … single enclosure, impenetrable by others” wherein two women are united in intimacy. The private space in Sappho's poetry “is a metaphor for emotional openness in a psychological setting apart … from everything experienced by a woman in the ordinary course of life” (“Private World” 56-57). These spaces often enclose one another within imagination and memory, as in “LP 96,” when Sappho in an intimate moment with Atthis comforts her for the loss of a friend, creating the space of the remembered thiasos as well as the imagined solitary moment when her separated friend in Lydia now longs for her. Likewise in “LP 2,” the space of the grove is interiorized to become the space of the longing body and the innermost shrine of the goddess. Through the poems, however, this private space is communal space, the very matter of intimacy celebrated within the thiasos.

This “emotional openness” so necessary to the growth of the young woman is also at the basis of two other mysteries: the figure of the bride or nymphe, and the image of the flower. These recurring presences point to the paradoxical, threshold quality of Sapphic eroticism, both virginal (cold streams through apple branches, the meadow of spring flowers, fresh breezes) and sensually charged (smoking incense, shadows of roses, quivering leaves, the gold cup waiting to be filled).

The young women on Lesbos are virgins being prepared for marriage. The nuptial moment is a threshold state, and the bride is a figure of passage. For the Greeks, the bride or nymphe denotes a woman at the moment of transition from maiden to wife and mother. Aphrodite, who is herself a Bride, guides these women in the refinement of their grace and in the cultivation of desire. The threshold of the bridal moment, sacred to the goddess, represents then a moment of fullness in beauty, of openness to the demands of Eros. That very openness carries intense potency; mythically the bride or nymph is associated with an ambiguous, aphroditic state of delicate yet awesome erotic potential.⁵ The name of nymph is also given to the goddesses who inhabit the wild regions of nature. They too are elusive and liminal figures, being, like aspects of elemental nature itself, both inviolate and erotically suggestive.

The flower is a natural image for the young girls of Sappho's Lesbos, for the delicacy and beauty of youth coming to distinct perfection at the moment of opening. The brief time of the opened flower is another liminal moment; and it is the major image attending descriptions of the community of girls surrounding the poet. But in Sappho's poetry—contrasting markedly, as Stigers shows, with a male poet's use of the image—the flower does not represent an incomplete process of development, but rather a specific kind of fullness possible in the thiasos, wherein a “maiden's delicate charm” and her “youthful, self-celebrating erotic drive could find expression without compromise of … her emotional freshness” (“Retreat from the Male” 92).

That flower and maiden are at the center of Sappho's world points to an obvious lyric preoccupation: loving and witnessing to the ephemeral. These two images represent “that brief moment when the beautiful shines out brilliantly and assumes, for all its perishability, the stature of an eternal condition in the spirit if not in the body” (McEvilley, “Sapphic Imagery” 269). Because they represent the gracious time of the union of souls in beauty, flowers carry the remembrance of the bonds within the thiasos of maidens. In one fragment (“LP 94”) Sappho recalls her parting words to a woman: “‘If you forget me, think / of our gifts to Aphrodite / and all the loveliness that we shared / all the violet tiaras, / braided rosebuds’” (trans. Barnard no. “42”). The garlands of flowers are woven times of the animated body, woven graces. Sappho's poems, recalling that unfading beauty in the heart, are themselves such moments, such woven roses (McEvilley, “Sapphic Imagery” 269).

Though H.D. understands fully her distance from this religious and mythic world of Lesbos, she nevertheless claims it in her way. She drew at least as much guidance from her study of Greek lyric poetry as from any contemporary influence or immediate tradition. That she absorbed aspects of craft and conception from these sources seems evident in her early poetry, in the choric voice, in rhythms associated with dance and erotic enchantment; in the figure of the nymph and the image of the flower; and in the image of the marginal space of erotic intimacy. Furthermore, like Sappho's lyrics, the early poems are forcefully ritualistic and liminal, demanding that the reader surrender ordinary orientation and participate in the erotic ordering of the poem. Jean Kammer has seen H.D.'s early poems as resting in a certain poetic mode which, unlike other forms of metaphor, does not move from concrete to abstract, but which rests in juxtaposition and suspension of concrete poetic elements in a configuration. Kammer says that the “absence of a named feeling … force[s] us to search for other, less rational entries into the poem.” This form of speech turns the metaphoric activity inward, so that “the reader is forced through the singular experience of the poem” (158).

H.D.'s poetic affinities with Sappho, however, are more fundamental than any external influences. They rest ultimately, one might say, in the kind of “goddess” they each imagine serving, and in the kind of lyric necessities that service entails. Sappho has Aphrodite at the center, and H.D. a more complex, syncretic figure drawing together qualities of Aphrodite, Artemis, and Athene. It is not so important to name this figure as to recognize her powerful, shaping presence. She insists upon the primacy of Eros as a ground of value and vision, and thus upon the worth of the animated mortal body. She promises within the experience of passion not only suffering but grace and loveliness, and a certain kind of purity and wisdom. This figure compels an ever deepening interiority as the matter of poetic exploration, so that a moment of mood comes to reveal its lucid truth, and the ephemeral becomes the god-given, oracular substance upon which the poetess works. Finally, this goddess by her liminal nature, her movement under and between cultural fixities, bequeaths to the lyricist her paradoxical role as a threshold figure, pointing inward to the truth of intimacy and suggesting withdrawal, while at the same time inviting public celebration.

H.D. in her essay “The Wise Sappho” might be describing this veiled and complex figure who gives sanction and potency to her lyric song. She calls upon the memory of Sappho's creation in a meditation upon the question of poetic and psychic survival. H.D. opens her reflection with the remark of Meleager of Gadara about the poems of Sappho that he gathered in his Garland: “‘Little, but all roses’” (Notes 57). Her whole meditation plays upon this phrase. H.D. at first negates, then qualifies and turns, then finally returns at the end of the essay to affirm his statement. But what accounts for her continuous metamorphic word play? Not roses, not all roses, not roses at all; not flowers—but rocks, island, country, spirit, song (Notes 57-58). This rhetorical process is necessary in order for H.D. to articulate the network of association defining for her the nature of Sappho's immortality. In this essay the Greek poet serves as a guide to her in working through what is essentially her own puzzle: what is the durable matter of fragile lyric song, what is the principle of durability within one's openness to the suffering of Eros? In other words, how does the rose survive, how is the rose a rock? One thing is certain: upon Sappho's endurance as the image of woman/poet/lover somehow depends her own.

In “The Wise Sappho” H.D. places herself implicitly in the position of Hellenistic Meleager, who lived, like the modern poet, in a mongrel and graceless age. In the proem to his Garland, Meleager says that he has gathered “flowers” from the ancient poets, adding his own, to weave a “garland” for his friends, though “the sweet-speaking garland of the Muses is common possession of all the initiated” (Palantine Anthology 4.1 [Paton 1]; my translation). In her work H.D., too, in a sense, gathers those flowers, the woven roses of Sappho and others, transmuted into her own severe poems; and they too are for an implied audience of friends and mystai, those within the mysteries of Eros.

But H.D. in this essay seems also to identify herself with Sappho—like the ancient poet she fashions roses with stubborn endurance in time. In that transmission/transmutation of Sappho into a new time, H.D. would not choose roses as the sign of Sapphic power and beauty: “I would bring orange blossoms, implacable flowerings made to seduce the sense when every other means has failed, poignard that glints, fresh sharpened steel: after the red heart, red lilies, impassioned roses are dead” (Notes 57). H.D. here reveals her literary place in relation to Sappho: after the “impassioned roses” are dead—after the living poems are lost, after the passionate life they represent is inaccessible—she would offer through her poetry what Sappho's fragments also seem to offer—other “implacable flowerings” that would “seduce the sense,” almost through violence, within the extreme numbness of modern life.

Though little remains of Sappho's work, H.D. reflects, it is durable matter: her fragmentary, “broken” poems are not lush roses, not flowers of any color, but rocks, within which “flowers by some chance may grow but which endure when the staunch blossoms have perished.” The fragments, in other words, are a ground, an enduring subtext, for imagination. More durable than individual poems is this rock-world: “Not roses, but an island, a country, a continent, a planet, a world of emotion, differing entirely from any present day imaginable world of emotion” (Notes 58).

What are the qualities of Sappho's Lesbos that flourish in imagination? H.D. remembers it in terms of its grace, its ample loveliness. Yet more than this she emphasizes the deep bitterness, “the bitterness of the sweat of Eros,” within which Sappho suffered (Notes 59-62). That suffering is essential to Sappho's “wisdom”—which H.D. understands not as an abstract, Platonic wisdom, not Greek sophrosyne or Christian constancy, but one gained within the nets of devastating feeling (Notes 63-64). The wisdom of Sappho's poetry, H.D. suggests, came from “the wind from Asia, heavy with ardent myrrh,” but tempered with a Western wind, “bearing in its strength and salt sting” the image of Athene (Notes 63). It is, in other words, characterized by its sensuous immediacy, but also by its questing spirit, its penetrating consciousness, its clarity and control. Sappho was “emotionally wise,” capable in her simplicity of seeing within the momentary awkward gesture of a girl “the undying spirit of goddess, muse or sacred being.” Sappho's wisdom is a concrete, human love which merges “muse and goddess and … human woman” in the perception of grace and beauty (Notes 64-65).

“Sappho has become for us a name.” As a cultural and artistic figure, H.D. finally implies, she is one with her poems and one with the power of her poems: she is “a pseudonym for poignant human feeling, she is indeed rocks set in a blue sea, she is the sea itself, breaking and tortured and torturing, but never broken.” She is an island “where the lover of ancient beauty (shipwrecked in the modern world) may yet find foothold and take breath and gain courage” (Notes 67). For this reason the puzzle of Sappho's mortal durability is significant—her poetry, rose/rock/island/sea, is the timeless matter of ephemeral feeling and ephemeral speech at the basis of lyric expression. In this sense—that Sappho is feeling, is a rocky island retreat for the lover of beauty—she is, I suggest, H.D.'s “sea garden.” She is the mythic figure at the ground of H.D.'s world of fragile sea- and rock-roses. She is the goddess who guards it, the sea that washes it, and the spirit informing the poet who suffers her ecstasies within it.

Notes

1. The manuscript from which “The Wise Sappho” was taken is not precisely dated. I do not claim, then, that H.D.'s essay directly informs Sea Garden—the case may indeed be the reverse—but that both come from the same imagination of the island experience, of which Lesbos was a configuration.

2. My understanding of Aphrodite and of the liminal qualities of Sappho's world has been greatly shaped by Friedrich, especially chs. 5 and 6.

3. In the major points of my interpretation of this poem I am indebted to McEvilley, “Sappho, Fragment Two.”

   Because of its grace, and not because of its literal accuracy, I quote here the version of Barnard. Here is my own literal rendering of the fragment: Come from Crete, for my sake, to this holy temple, where is the lovely grove of apple-trees, and where altars are smoking with frankincense; therein cold water murmurs through apple branches, and the space is all shaded over with roses, and from quivering leaves an enchanted sleep descends; therein a meadow where horses feed has blossomed with spring flowers, and soothing breezes blow … there … Cypris, pour gracefully in golden cups nectar mingled with these festivities.

4. For a discussion of rites of passage see Turner 94ff.

5. Two important elaborations of the significance of the nymphe are those of Winkler 77-78; and Detienne 102-3.

Works Cited

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Doolittle, Hilda (H.D.). Notes on Thought and Vision & The Wise Sappho. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1982.

Friedrich, Paul. The Meaning of Aphrodite. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1978.

Kammer, Jean. “The Art of Silence and the Forms of Women's Poetry.” Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979. 153-64.

Lobel, Edgar, and Denys Page, eds. Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta. 1955. Oxford: Clarendon-Oxford UP, 1968.

McEvilley, Thomas. “Sapphic Imagery and Fragment 96.” Hermes 101 (1973): 257-78.

———. “Sappho, Fragment Two.” Phoenix 26 (1972): 323-33.

Nagy, Gregory. “Phaethon, Sappho's Phaon, and the White Rock of Leukas.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 77 (1973): 137-77.

Paton, W. R., ed. The Greek Anthology. 5 vols. 1916. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP; London: William Heinemann, 1969.

Sappho. Trans. Mary Barnard. Berkeley: U of California P, 1958.

Segal, Charles. “Eros and Incantation: Sappho and Oral Poetry.” Arethusa 7.2 (1974): 139-60.

Stigers, Eva Stehle. “Retreat from the Male: Catullus 62 and Sappho's Erotic Flowers.” Ramus 6.2 (1977): 83-102.

———. “Sappho's Private World.” Reflections of Women in Antiquity. Ed. Helene P. Foley. New York: Gordon and Breach Science, 1981. 45-61.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. 1969. Symbol, Myth, and Ritual Series. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Paperbacks-Cornell UP, 1977.

Winkler, Jack. “Gardens of Nymphs: Public and Private in Sappho's Lyrics.” Reflections of Women in Antiquity. Ed. Helene P. Foley. New York: Gordon and Breach Science, 1981. 63-89.