Monthly Archives: August 2019

Stillman, Sappho, Swinburne and the Sapphic

One of my most treasured books, which I return to for reference more than any other book I possess, is The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary, first published by the American academic and poet Frances Stillman in 1966. The dogeared copy on my bookshelves was purchased in 1991 upon it’s eighth re-print, since when it has influenced and informed my understanding and appreciation of poetry. An invaluable pre-internet resource for any aspiring poet, in addition to a complex and comprehensive rhyming dictionary her book contains seven chapters outlining the traditional structures, meters, rhymes and forms of poetry as appreciated towards the termination of the twentieth century, illustrated with excerpts from many well known poets and a modest scattering of her own verse. 

Although copies of her books can still be found in second hand bookshops and even on certain online book forums, sadly, Stillman herself seems to have slipped into obscurity. A brief obituary from the New York Times dated 5 February 1975 reads as follows:

“Dr. Frances Jennings Stillman, assistant professor of English at City College and a writer and translator, died Monday at New York Hospital of complications resulting from kidney failure. She was 65 years old. Dr. Stillman, who also had taught at Brooklyn and Hunter, Colleges, was the author of “The Poet’s Manual and Rhyming Dictionary.” She translated “Flemish Tapestries,” written by Roger D’Hulst, and “Oriental Love Poems,” among other works. For many years, she was an officer in the New York Chapter of the American Association of University Women. Dr. Stillman earned B.A. and M.A. degrees at the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. degree at the City University of New York.” 

It was Dr Stillman who, through her book, introduced me to the lyrical form known as the Sapphic, named after the enigmatic Greek poet who lived on the island of Lesbos during the sixth Century BC. 

The historical biography of the poet known as Sappho is fragmentary and speculative. She was believed to have been born on the island of Lesbos around 620 BC. During antiquity she was regarded as one of the finest lyrical poets of the time. Plato revered her as the tenth muse (in Greek mythology there were traditionally believed to be nine muses devoted to poetry, history, music, dance and astronomy, amongst other things). 

Sappho, as envisaged by Charles Mengin, 1877. In the care of Manchester City Art Gallery.

Many of Sappho’s poems have been lost, and much of those that survive do so in fragmentary form, but her influence upon modern poetry, particularly the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, cannot be understated. Her poems have been translated by Sir Philip Sidney, Percy Shelley, George Gordon, Lord Byron, Alfred Tennyson and many others, including the nineteenth-century Greek poet Aléxandros Soútsos. The spontaneity, simplicity, and honesty of her verse strongly influenced the Romantic idea of the poet as a creature of feeling, one whose solitary song is overheard, as opposed to the classical didactic model of the poet as a cultural spokesperson.

As Dr Stillman teaches, the main building blocks of the sapphic are trochees and dactyls. The trochee is a metrical foot with one stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable, while the dactyl contains a stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables. The first three lines of the sapphic contain two trochees, a dactyl, and then two more trochees. The shorter fourth, and final, line of the stanza is called an “Adonic” and is composed of one dactyl followed by a trochee. 

The following deconstruction uses a verse from a modern English translation of Sappho’s Anactoria poem.

The Sapphic form explained, after Stillman, 1966

The extant fragment of this poem explores Sappho’s longing for her lost love Anaktória, and her admiration of the female form. 

Some there are who say that the fairest thing seen 
on the black earth is an array of horsemen;
some, men marching; some would say ships; but I say
   she whom one loves best

is the loveliest. Light were the work to make this
plain to all, since she, who surpassed in beauty
all mortality, Helen, once forsaking
   her lordly husband,

fled away to Troy—land across the water. 
Not the thought of child nor beloved parents 
was remembered, after the Queen of Cyprus
   won her at first sight.

Since young brides have hearts that can be persuaded 
easily, light things, palpitant to passion
as am I, remembering Anaktória
   who has gone from me

and whose lovely walk and the shining pallor
of her face I would rather see before my 
eyes than Lydia’s chariots in all their glory
   armoured for battle

Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene 1864 Simeon Solomon 1840-1905 Purchased 1980 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T03063

The erotic homosexual content of many of her poems has won Sappho the accolade of being the first (first recorded at least) Lesbian, the very term being derived form her Aegean island home of Lesbos. Undoubtedly, it was the freely erotic components of her work that fascinated certain protagonists of the Romantic movement, who in their own somewhat chauvinist way were striving to break free of the cultural conventionality of  eighteenth and nineteenth century society. 

Perhaps the most accomplished Romantic exponent of the Sapphic form was Algernon Charles Swinburne. Very much a product of the English Victorian establishment, born to a wealthy family in the North East of England, educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, Swinburne none-the-less became a preeminent symbol of rebellion against the conservative values of his time. Greatly influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and other member of the Pre-Raphaeltie Brotherhood, his poems were often explicitly sexual, perhaps designed specifically to shock the very establishment from which he came. Swinburne gained notoriety in 1865 with the publication of Poems and Ballads, a collection of poems which many critics of the time regarded as indecent. 

Algernon Charles Swinburne, 1862, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

The fragment below is taken from his poem Sapphics, written in the Sapphic meter as described above and undoubtedly in homage to the poet Sappho. 

All the night sleep came not upon my eyelids,
Shed not dew, nor shook nor unclosed a feather,
Yet with lips shut close and with eyes of iron
   Stood and beheld me.

Then to me so lying awake a vision
Came without sleep over the seas and touched me,
Softly touched mine eyelids and lips; and I too,
   Full of the vision,

Saw the white implacable Aphrodite,
Saw the hair unbound and the feet unsandalled
Shine as fire of sunset on western waters;
   Saw the reluctant

Feet, the straining plumes of the doves that drew her,
Looking always, looking with necks reverted,
Back to Lesbos, back to the hills whereunder
   Shone Mitylene;

Many years ago, inspired by Dr Stillman’s tutelage, I put pen to paper and came up with the poem below, which I called Castaway. It is based on the myth of Calypso, as told in Homer’s Odyssey, who detained the Greek hero Odysseus on the island of Ogygia during his long voyage home from the Trojan wars. 

Calypso & Odysseus by Sir William Russell Flint

Wreckage adrift on blue Aegean waters
Clinging the rope cut fingers burn and blister
Slowly cracking the salty sun bleached timbers
   bake in the sunlight

Came I to these islands by currents rolling
Red kelp and oyster shell over and over
Till bound in their shackles washed ashore on her
   shingle she found me

Almond Oil and Meadow sweet, fresh mint from the
Mountains, yellow Broom and Oak flower petals
Smoothed by her spidery fingers worked warm through
   my still dormant flesh

Lips part to tongue touching teeth with each whisper
Soft scent of apples her dark anaesthesia
Heady the night the breath of her warm body
   falls sleep over me

Daylight gold in her hair veils sweet soft hollows
Wine blushed lips taste the damp dew of the morning
Naked children of an absent god giggle
   at their honesty

Long shore pull drags the hissing shingle seaward
Roar of the deep wave beckons the shifting tide
Impudent voice of reason voice of motion
   still calling, calling


Frances Jennings Stillman obituary from the New York Times: accessed 6 August 2019
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/02/05/archives/dr-frances-stillman-dies-english-professor-at-city-65.html

The Hunt

I had that dream again, you know
the dream I often dream …

There I am, standing in the crowd,
Some way to my left I see
the stoney pillars of the Friend’s House,
to my right, pennants and banners,
a multitude of colours, gently waving in the breeze
a sea of motion,
the murmur of fifty thousand expectant voices
punctuated by cries of victory, of Liberty, Fraternity
Ahead the hustings pulled into position as Orator Hunt climbs the steps to the stand
waving his oversized white hat,
to the assembled multitude
He dun’t half think a lot of himself, says Mary
threading her arm through mine

Faces turn to the rear now
Far behind us red coats gather in ranks
their bayonets glinting in the mid-summer sun
The Riot Act read from an open window
falls on deaf ears
arrest warrants handed to the constable
pleas for assistance dispatched to the Yeomanry and the Hussars

Mary’s grip upon my arm tightens
as the crowd suddenly surges forward

Pounding, the rhythm of horse’s hooves
upon the desiccated earth send
a shock-wave of panic across St Peter’s Field
speakers silenced, placards discarded,
faces etched with fear,
“Universal Suffrage” trampled into the dust
trampled beneath a hundred thousand feet
running for their very lives,
weeping in desperation for her unborn child,
Sweet Mary running beside me, falls, and cannot regain her stance

Assistance is useless
I cannot stand with the weight of the crowd upon me
So close now, the yelping dogs
the pounding of hooves
closer and closer
their baying bloodlust an augury
of the knife white teeth
each blast of the horn,
each bark of the riders,
a portent of death
ever closer, their scornful breath
until the hounds teeth tear
until the rapiers are brought down upon Mary’s flesh
the incisive canines cutting, lacerating
until flesh is no more,
her bloodied dress; the bloodied muzzles of the dogs
still barking, barking, barking!

I wake!
Throw open the window to catch my breath
the sky
bright with every light in the universe
has thrown out a mantle of white
across the cold, crisp night.
The only motion the blinking lights of an aircraft
circling in descent
And the russet flash of a fox
half hidden in the shadowed coppice, he barks,
his mournful, wicked bark
for a moment our eyes meet
then he turns and is gone
the two of us only somewhat reassured
that tonight the hounds are silent
the privileged riders confined to barracks
and for now, the fox and I are free

Mary Heys, a mother of six from Oxford Road, Manchester was one of eighteen peaceful protestors killed by the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry Cavalry at St Peter’s Field, 16 August 1819. 

It is estimated that between sixty and eighty thousand people had gathered in St Peter’s Field, Manchester to hear the radical speaker Henry Hunt and to protest against the limited suffrage afforded to working people and the North of England in general at the time. In 1819, Lancashire, with a population of over one million, was represented by two members of parliament; whereas so called rotten boroughs such as Old Sarum in Wiltshire, with one voter, elected two MPs, as did Dunwich in Suffolk, which by the early 19th century had almost completely disappeared into the sea.

Manchester Heroes, Sept 1819 Credit: The Art Archive / Eileen Tweedy Ref: AA327714 BBC History Magazine

The Manchester and Salford Yeomanry were an amateur militia of local businessmen and their sons, described at the time by the Manchester Observer as “the fawning dependents of the great, who imagine they acquire considerable importance by wearing regimentals” and also as “younger members of the Tory party in arms.” Their sabre charge of the crowd at St Peter’s Field left eighteen dead and hundreds wounded.

Mary Heys was pregnant at the time of her death. 

In memory of Chris Grice

Chris and I were not close friends. I think I should be clear about that. I last saw him just before Christmas, I think. Memory does not serve me well, because the last thing I was expecting was to not see Chris again. He was forty-three years old for heaven’s sake. 

In the deceitful way that it does, social media had replaced direct contact. I Iast communicated with Chris just days before his death. He had posted a “memory,” a photograph of the some Cheshire Walkers taken at Ashness Bridge in the July of 2008, Chris casually sitting on the little stone packhorse bridge with his long legs dangling over the waters of Barrow Beck. “11 years? OMG!” I commented and Chris recalled how the photo had been taken the day after we had climbed Scafell Pike, how some members of the group had drunk a little too much that night and had been told off for being rowdy at the campsite. I am looking at Chris’s Facebook page as I write this, in the peculiar way that our social media profiles survive us posthumously. 

A regular member of the Merseyside “Fillyaboots” Ramblers’ club, Chris would on occasion appear on a walk with the Cheshire Walkers, the Rambler’s club to which I have been ensconced for many years. So it was through these sporadic appearances that I came to know this tall, enthusiastic Liverpudlian. Again memory fails me as I try to recall the first walk on which I met Chris, but I certainly remember him being with us on some classic days out such as our circuit of the Snowdon Horseshoe in June 2008 and a rather cold and damp linear walk I led one Easter over Mynydd Mawr in Gwynedd when we took the Welsh Mountain Railway from Waunfawr to Rhyd Ddu.

Chris was a consummate mountain man; a fearless scrambler, often leaping ahead over rock steps whilst the rest of us struggled to haul ourselves up at the rear. He often spoke of his joy at completing the Aonach Eagach ridge in Glen Coe, not once but twice. And this is what I will remember about Chris, his joy, his enthusiasm for being in the hills and mountains of the British Isles. 

Crib Goch, Snowdon Horseshoe June 2008

The nineteenth century American environmentalist Henry David Thoreau said “On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devoted to us the task of a double living, that we have henceforth to fulfil the promise of our friend’s life also, in our own, to the world.” Death often comes as a wakeup call to those who knew the departed, especially in the case of one taken so young. This weekend I will be out walking in the countryside, and in future, whenever the opportunity arises; whenever I make the opportunity.  In some small way Chris will be with me, with others who knew him and walked with him, as his promise continues to be fulfilled.

RIP Chris Grice. Rambler. 1976-2019