“The Last Song of Sappho” (1831)

Publication Context

Felicia Hemans’s “The Last Song of Sappho” as it appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 29:175, 129, January 1831.

 

SOUND on, thou dark unslumbering sea!
My dirge is in thy moan;
My spirit finds response in thee,
To its own ceaseless cry–‘Alone, alone !’

Yet send me back one other word,
Ye tones that never cease !
Oh ! let your secret caves be stirr’d,
And say, dark waters! will ye give me peace?

Away! my weary soul hath sought
In vain one echoing sigh,                                                     10
One answer to consuming thought
In human hearts–and will the wave reply ?

Sound on, thou dark, unslumbering sea!
Sound in thy scorn and pride !
I ask not, alien world, from thee,
What my own kindred earth hath still denied.

And yet I loved that earth so well,
With all its lovely things!
–Was it for this the death-wind fell
On my rich lyre, and quench’d its living strings?                         20

–Let them lie silent at my feet !
Since broken even as they,
The heart whose music made them sweet,
Hath pour’d on desert-sands its wealth away.

Yet glory’s light hath touch’d my name,
The laurel-wreath is mine–
–With a lone heart, a weary frame–
O restless deep ! I come to make them thine !

Give to that crown, that burning crown,
Place in thy darkest hold!                                                        30
Bury my anguish, my renown,
With hidden wrecks, lost gems, and wasted gold.

Thou sea-bird on the billow’s crest,
Thou hast thy love, thy home;
They wait thee in the quiet nest,
And I, the unsought, unwatch’d-for–I too come!

I, with this winged nature fraught,
These visions wildly free,
This boundless love, this fiery thought–
Alone I come–oh ! give me peace, dark sea!                                   40