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Her frenzies in Anactoria, where, if our hypothesis is correct, Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness, arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries, What had all we done That we should live and loathe the sterile sun, And with the moon wax paler as she wanes, And pulse by pulse feel time grow through our veins?
It is amusing to read of the author of Anactoria as a child going about with Bowdler's Shakespeare under his arm and, in later years, assisting Jowett in the preparation of a Child's Bible. To have written books and to have died in battle has been a common enough fate in the last few years.
Rose and violet of the eighteen ninety hues have for long been dispensed with, as has the pierrot and his moon. We have in this time come to like hardier colourings, which are for us more satisfying, and more poetic. We hardly dare use the hot words of "Anactoria" in our day.
In many guises didst thou come to me; I saw thee by the maidens when they danced, Phaon allured me with a look of thine, In Anactoria I knew thy grace. I looked at Cercolas and saw thine eyes, But never wholly, soul and body mine Didst thou bid any love me as I loved. The last two lines suggest another reason for the fickleness, as well as for the insatiability of the poet's love.
In her case, unlike that of the ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's Anactoria Sappho compares her sensations Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year When I love thee. In Mackaye's Sappho and Phaon, when Alcaeus pleads for the love of the poetess, she asserts of herself,
In Anactoria she tells the object of her infatuation: I would my love could kill thee: I am satiated With seeing thee alive, and fain would have thee dead. * I would find grievous ways to have thee slain, Intense device and superflux of pain. And after detailing with gusto the bloody ingenuities of her plan of torture, she states that her motive is, To wring thy very spirit through the flesh.
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