e, darkness,
And mirk and mire and black oblivion,
Despairs that raven where no camp-fire is,
Like the wild beasts. I shall be even blest
To be so damned.

Most often this conception of love's flamelike lightening of life for
the poet is applied to Sappho. Many modern English poets picture her
living "with the swift singing strength of fire." [Footnote: See
Southey, _Sappho_; Mary Robinson (1758-1800), _Sappho and Phaon_; Philip
Moren Freneau, _Monument of Phaon_; James Gates Percival, _Sappho_;
Charles Kingsley, _Sappho_; Lord Houghton, _A Dream of Sappho_;
Swinburne, _On the Cliffs_, _Anactoria_, _Sapphics_; Cale Young Rice,
_Sappho's Death Song_; Sara Teasdale, _Sappho_; Percy Mackaye, _Sappho
and Phaon_; Zoe Akins, _Sappho to a Swallow on the Ground_; James B.
Kenyon, _Phaon Concerning Sappho_, _Sappho_ (1920); William Alexander
Percy, _Sappho in Levkos_ (1920).] Swinburne, in _On the Cliffs_, claims
this as the essential attribute of genius, when he cries to her for
sympathy,

For all my days as all thy days from birth
My heart as thy heart was in me as thee
Fire, and not all the fountains of the sea
Have waves enough to quench it; nor on earth
Is fuel enough to feed,
While day sows night, and night sows day for seed.

This intensity of perception is largely the result, or the cause, of the
poet's unusually sensitive consciousness of the ephemeralness of love.
The notion of permanence often seems to rob love of all its poetical
quality. The dark despair engendered by a sense of its transience is
needed as a foil to the fiery splendors of passion. Thus Rupert Brooke,
in the sonnet, _Mutability_, dismisses the Platonic idea of eternal
love and beauty, declaring,

Dear, we know only that we sigh, kiss, smile;
Each kiss lasts but the kissing; and grief goes over;
Love has no habitation but the heart:
Poor straws! on the dark flood we catch awhile,
Cling, and are borne into the night apart,
The laugh dies with the lips, "Love" with the lover.

Sappho is represented as especially aware of this aspect of her love.
Her frenzies in _Anactoria_, where, if our hypothesis is correct,
Swinburne must have been terribly concerned over his natural coldness,
arise from rebellion at the brevity of love. Sappho cries,

What had all we done
That we should live and loathe the sterile sun,
And with the moon wax paler as she wanes,
And pulse by pulse feel