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Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson
Landscape in Poetry from Homer to Tennyson Author:Francis Turner Palgrave Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III LANDSCAPE IN GREEK LYRICAL, IDYLLIC, AND EPIGRAMMATIC POETRY Lyrical poetry, whether in its first natural use as the expression of personal fe... more »eling, or in the solemn, national, and religious ode, has offered small space for landscape until modern days. Yet that " Tenth Muse, Sappho fair" (Fl. c. 500 B.c.), as Plato named her, shows her exquisite Aeolian art and tenderness, " very woman " in everything, in certain little descriptive fragments, " more golden than gold," surviving still amongst the lamentable wreck of that consummate genius. Such is the garden vignette, where the rivulet murmurs cold among the apple-tree boughs, and sleep streams down on the trembling leaves.1 Or take another, unsurpassable in its utter simplicity : Set are moon and Pleiades, and it is midnight, and the hour is already passing, but I sleep alone? Last, the lovely bridal song, which I once tried to render thus— r Si ij/vxpov /ceXdSei Si' I have sometimes thought that we might render the words, ' ' the rivulet murmurs through troughs of apple-tree branches." But the text here is sadly uncertain. 2 SiSvKe /iiv a ffedvva , irapij . S' (px"'' w Si /jAva /careiJSw. O fair— O sweet ! l As the sweet apple blooms high on the bough, High on the highest, forgot of the gatherers : So Thou : — Yet not so : nor forgot of the gatherers ; High o'er their reach in the golden air, O sweet — O fair ! A more complete night scene remains for us, written about a century earlier by Alkman of Sardis (Fl. 670 B.c.) — Sleep mountain-tops and ravines, Sleep headland and torrent ; Sleep what dark earth bears on her bosom, Green leaves and insects ; Beasts in the den and bees in their families ; Monsters in depths of the violet sea : Sleeps every bird,...« less