Victorian Poetry

Victorian poetry and historicism

Assuredly, determining "History's truth" in relation to Sappho was no
easy matter. With the publication of Henry Thornton Wharton's 1885
edition of her poetry, a radically alternative Sappho was proposed from
either the paragon of chastity or the supreme expression of heterosexual
female desire of earlier modern tradition. The volume opened with John
Addington Symonds's anonymous homoerotic prose translation of Sappho's
"Ode to Aphrodite" where for the first time in the English language readers
saw that the Lesbian poet's object of desire was female. 32 Wharton's
controversial edition exerted considerable influence in shaping the coded
articulation of female same-sex desire. It is in the poetry of Katherine
Bradley and her niece Edith Cooper, who published collaboratively under
the name Michael Field, that the pagan emphasis of the new Hellenism is
given a Sapphic inflection.
In this regard, Michael Field's most significant publication is the volume
Long Ago (1889), where the author's preface acknowledges the inspiration
of Wharton's edition:

When, more than a year ago, I wrote to a literary friend of my attempt to

express in English verse the passionate pleasure Dr. Wharton's book had

brought to me, he replied: "That is a delightfully audacious thought - the

extension of Sappho's fragments into lyrics. I can scarcely conceive anything

more audacious"...

Devoutly as the fiery-bosomed Greek turned in her anguish to Aphrodite,

praying her to accomplish her heart's desires, I have turned to the one woman

who has dared to speak unfalteringly of the fearful mastery of love. (iii) 33

Audacious in more ways than one, Michael Field's poems are translations
and extensions of the Sapphic fragments, some of which are explicitly
homoerotic. "Come Gorgo, put the rug in place, / And passionate recline"
is the seductive opening of Poem xxxv: an elaboration of fragment 35,
which translates as "But do not put on airs for the sake of a ring" (56). By
comparison, Poem xxxiii declares:

Maids, not to you my mind doth change;

Men I defy, allure, estrange,

Prostrate, make bond or free:

Soft as the stream beneath the plane

To you I sing my love's refrain;

Between us is no thought of pain,

Peril, satiety. (52)

At the head of each poem in Long Ago, there are epigraphs taken from
Sappho's Greek fragments, recalling Rossetti's use of Dante and Petrarch in
"Monna Innominata." But rather than signifying a masculinist tradition

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