Classic Poem

Marble was her lovely city
And so pleasant was its air
That the Romans had no pity
For a Roman banished there;
Lesbos was a singing island
And a happy home from home
With the pines about its highland
And its crescent faint with foam.
Lady make a nota bene
That Love's lyric fount of glee
Rose in marbled Mytilene
Channelled by the purple sea.
Sappho sang to her hetairai,
And each lovely lyricist
Sappho's singing emulated;
And this point must not be missed:
Women were emancipated
Long before the Christian era,
Long before the time of Christ.
Then not only were they equal
To their men folk but themselves;
And the lovely lyric sequel
Lives on all our learned shelves.
Yes: we may be fairly certain,
As results of this release,
Sappho's was, with all its Girton
Girls, the fairest Isle of Greece.

II

Ah, those Isles of Asia Minor!
Was there ever such a coast?
Dawned there any day diviner
On a blither singing host?
Do not give this thought an inning
Lest the critics take it wrong:
In proportion to the sinning
Is the excellence of song.
Sin had not yet been imported.
In those days to the Levant,
So the singers loved and sported,
Raised the paean, rhymed the chant,
Until Hebrew fortune tellers
Terrorised the pleasant scene,
Hawking horrors as best-sellers,
Mixing bards and baths with sin.
Therefore pass no moral stricture
On that fairest of Earth's states;
And succumb not to the mixture
Of ideas up with dates.

We shall find as we go boating
(You are paying for the yacht),
That those isles on purple floating
Were the isles of guiltless thought,
Isles whereby a peacock's feather
Would, if cast into the bay,
In the green and purple weather
Be reduced to hodden gray.
Gloomy thoughts are just a failing
From which you must win release
If with me you would come sailing
Carefree through the Isles of Greece.
Therefore pass no surly sentence
From our time and towns fog-pent,
Much less ask for their repentance
Who had nothing to repent.