Kimmi Lane's Canonball

4-5-11

Letitia Elizabeth Landon was something of a poetic prodigy from a young age. She started publishing poems in William Jerdan’s Literary Gazette at the tender age of fifteen. Her poetry concerns the subject of love and a woman’s role in society and they were very well received by the public. She accepts the definition of “woman” as “one who loves” as well as the notion of separate spheres – one of intellect and ambition for the men and one of emotion and body for women. Her poems, for the most part, narrate the love, rejection, and subsequent downfall of her heroines, often rewriting the stories of already famous women. For instance, the poem “The Proud Ladye” has as its heroine John Keats’ villain Adeline from “La Belle Dame sans Merci”, only now she is seen as an objectified woman, appreciated by men only for her beauty, her wealth, or her nobility. She is now only a woman trying to find a good man in the world who will truly return her love. I mean, who isn’t?

However, my selection for introduction into the BRL canon is “Sappho’s Song”. I have chosen this poem because it truly embodies L. E. L.’s main point throughout her work: that women who live the part expected of them during the romantic period will lead empty, self-defeating lives only to meet their eventual downfalls in death or despair. Or a nunnery.

Sappho was a Greek lyric poet from the sixth century BC best known for her love poetry written for other women. Not much is known about her actual life, because our main sources are her poems which may or may not be autobiographical. She could have died by suicide, jumping off a cliff into the sea over love for a male youth, Phaon. Although, this is probably just a myth, this is the event on which L. E. L’s “Sappho’s Song” is based, as evidenced by lines nineteen and twenty “My glorious grave – yon deep blue sea: / I shall sleep calm beneath its wave!” At the time they were written, Sappho’s poetry would have not just been written down for the sake of reading it, as it often is today. Poetry was written to be heard and performed, set to music as songs. Thus, L. E. L.’s Sappho-inspired work is written in a way such that it could be sung, if music were set to it. It has a regular ABAB rhyme scheme, meaning that every other line in each stanza rhymes, and it is entirely in iambic tetrameter. This means that there are four stressed syllables in every line of the poem. It gives the poem a rhythm and flow and a sing-song quality.

In the poem, Sappho is a woman rejected, as are all of L. E. L.’s women. The scorner is purposely not stated in the poem and the scornee’s identity is known only from the title. Grecian themes are otherwise represented in references to a sun-god, as well as the speaker’s lute. Other than these, the theme and the story is fairly ambiguous. Take the title away and the speaker could technically be male or female, as could the unnamed recipient of the speaker’s devotion. Yet, despite the non-gendered pronouns and even without being told that the speaker is Sappho, a reader in the romantic period would easily have identified the speaker as female, because she lives only for love and emotion. This was the way the ideal woman was supposed to act. It would be like someone today saying “I grew up playing with My Little Ponies and my favorite Barbie came with hoop earrings.” It would be only rational to conclude that this person is female. L. E. L. has drawn on her societal norms to create an ideological version of Sappho. As for the “thou” in the poem, Sappho’s fame as a female writer of love poetry for other women would at first lead one to believe the “thou” female. However, the foot note in the Matlak and Mellor text begins to introduce doubt that can be further substantiated by the general theme of all the works of L. E. L. The note specifically mentions the legend of Sappho killing herself for Phaon, although this most likely did not occur in the life of the real Sappho. Further, L. E. L.’s women are not faithless. Above all things, they believe in love. Love is like oxygen. Love is a many-splendored thing. Love lifts them up where they belong. All they need is love. The men in L. E. L.’s poems also tend to fit the description of the ideal man of the time period, i.e. intellectual and ambitious. These men choose women who will somehow benefit them socially or economically. Love does not play into it. Therefore, what a woman considered faithless, a man would explain as simply logical.

At the beginning of the poem, the actual scorning has already occurred and Sappho is merely trying to figure out where she went wrong and in the opening lines she is using her instrument as a scapegoat for all of her troubles. She has decided that it must be her lute’s fault, because of the love songs she had created with using it. Surely, without its “burning chords” (line 2) she could never have felt a passion so deeply as she does now? But then, in the second stanza, she realizes that she wrote the songs because love inspired them, not because the lute brought them about. “It was not song that taught me love, / But it was love that taught me song” (lines 11-12). If she could love without being taught to do so, then she must have been cursed by Fate itself, or her “evil star above” (line 9). Yet, it wasn’t Fate directly that ruined her. It was this nameless “faithless one” (line 15) who taught her to love and then left her to rot. Her love for this man now dead, Sappho has essentially been murdered herself. As the writers point out at the bottom of page 1378, “Landon’s heroines are conscious only of what they can experience through the body, on earth; they have no conception of an afterlife. When love dies, they die.”

Through this poem, L. E. L. has pointed out the dilemma facing the women of her time. If they make themselves as men would choose and live only for love and the things they feel, they will be betrayed by these men who have led them astray. This helps her to make her point that women cannot be viewed as they are, but should instead be treated as well-rounded human beings rather than as the flat characters that men would make them out to be. The poem “Sappho’s Song” should be added to the literary canon of future British Romantic Literature classes because it illustrates the difficulties the women of the time faced as they tried to balance what they were supposed to be with who they really were.