Stung with Love: Poems and Fragments of Sappho

by Sappho

The old and withered Tithonous recounts his sad decay in Alfred Lord Tennyson’s dramatic monologue Tithonus (1860), 15–23; in this version, however, it is Dawn herself, rather than Zeus, who gives her lover eternal life: I asked thee, ‘Give me immortality.’ Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile, Like wealthy men who care not how they give. But thy strong Hours indignant worked their wills, And beat me down and marred and wasted me, And though they could not end me, left me maimed To dwell in presence of immortal youth, Immortal age beside immortal youth, And all I was, in ashes. Girls, chase the violet-bosomed Muses’ bright Gifts and the plangent lyre, lover of hymns: Stiffness has seized on these once supple limbs, And black braids with the passing years turned white. Age weighs heavily on me, and the knees Buckle that long ago, like fawns, pranced nimbly. I groan much but to what end? Humans simply Cannot be ageless like divinities. They say that rosy-forearmed Dawn, when stung With love, swept a sweet youth to the earth’s rim – Tithonous. Even there age withered him, Bound still to a wife forever young.