Pound expresses
his feeling that it is time to move on to a fresh inspiration:

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,--
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
My much praised, but not altogether satisfactory lady.

As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal
beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting
affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible
vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through
first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of
the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This
is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our
writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and
blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the
ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or
belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's _Anactoria_ Sappho
compares her sensations

Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year
When I love thee.

In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love
of the poetess, she asserts of herself,

I doubt if ever she saw form of man
Or maiden either whom, being beautiful,
She hath not loved.

When Alcaeus protests, "But not with passion!" she rejoins,

All
That breathes to her is passion, love itself
All passionate.

The inevitability of fickleness arising from her idealism, which fills
her with insuperable discontent, is voiced most clearly by the
nineteenth century Sappho through the lips of Sara Teasdale, in lines
wherein she dismisses those who gossip about her:

How should they know that Sappho lived and died
Faithful to love, not faithful to the lover,
Never transfused and lost in what she loved,
Never so wholly loving nor at peace.
I asked for something greater than I found,
And every time that love has made me weep
I have rejoiced that love could be so strong;
For I have stood apart and watched my soul
Caught in a gust of passion as a bird
With baffled wings against the dusty whirlwind
Struggles and frees itself to find the sky.

She continues, apostrophizing beauty,

In many guises didst thou come to me;
I saw thee by the maidens when they danced,
Phaon allured me with a look of thine,
In Anactoria