lips and fingers,
Full of songs and kisses and little whispers,
Full of music; only beheld among them
Soar as a bird soars
Newly fledged, her visible song, a marvel
Made of perfect sound and exceeding passion,
Sweetly shapen, terrible, full of thunders,
Clothed with the wind's wings.

It seems likely that this myth of Aphrodite's anger is an allegory
indicating the tragic character of all poetic love, in that, while
incarcerated in the body, the singer strives to break through the limits
of the flesh and to grasp ideality. The issue is made clear in Mackaye's
drama. There Sappho's rival is Thalassa, Phaon's slave-mate, who
conceives as love's only culmination the bearing of children. Sappho, in
her superiority, points out that mere perpetuation of physical life is a
meaningless circle, unless it leads to some higher satisfaction. But in
the end the figure of "the eternal mother," as typified by Thalassa, is
more powerful than is Sappho, in the struggle for Phaon's love. Thus
Aphrodite asserts her unwillingness to have love refined into a merely
spiritual conception.

Often the greatest poets, as Sappho herself, are represented as having
no more than a blind and instinctive apprehension of the supersensual
beauty which is shining through the flesh, and which is the real object
of desire. But thus much ideality must be characteristic of love, it
seems obvious, before it can be spiritually creative. Unless there is
some sense of a universal force, taking the shape of the individual
loved one, there can be nothing suggestive in love. Instead of waking
the lover to the beauty in all of life, as we have said, it would, as
the non-lover has asserted, blind him to all but the immediate object of
his pursuit. Then, the goal being reached, there would be no reason for
the poet's not achieving complete satisfaction in love, for there would
be nothing in it to suggest any delight that he does not possess.
Therefore, having all his desire, the lover would be lethargic, with no
impulse to express himself in song. Probably something of this sort is
the meaning of the Tannhauser legend, as versified both by Owen Meredith
and Emma Lazarus, showing the poet robbed of his gift when he comes
under the power of the Paphian Venus. Such likewise is probably the
meaning of Oscar Wilde's sonnet, _Helas_, quoted above.

While we thus lightly dismiss sensual love as unpoetical, we must
remember that Burns, in some of his accou