The Moon has left the sky,
Lost is the Pleiads’ light;
It is midnight,
And time slips by,
But on my couch alone I lie.
This singularly beautiful fragment is quoted by Hephaestion as an example of metre. With the “Hymn to Aphrodite” it was the first portion of the Poems of Sappho to be printed in 1554.
49
Πλήρης μεν ἐφαίνετ᾽ α σελάννα
αἰ δ᾽ ὠς περὶ βῶμον ἐστάθησαν.
The moon rose full, and as around an altar, stood the women.
Now rose the moon, full and argentine,
While round stood the maidens, as at a shrine.
Quoted by Hephaestion as an example of the metre known as the Ionic a majore trimeter brachycatalectic. Poetically the figure is a fine one, and shows Sappho’s wonderful power of visualizing a scene in a few unerringly chosen words. The moon and its light had a great attraction for her, as a number of fragments shows.
