Sapphics

By William Faulkner 1897–1962 William Faulkner

So it is: sleep comes not on my eyelids.

Nor in my eyes, with shaken hair and white

Aloof pale hands, and lips and breasts of iron,

So she beholds me.

And yet though sleep comes not to me, there comes

A vision from the full smooth brow of sleep,

The white Aphrodite moving unbounded

By her own hair.

In the purple beaks of the doves that draw her,

Beaks straight without desire, necks bent backward

Toward Lesbos and the flying feet of Loves

Weeping behind her.

She looks not back, she looks not back to where

The nine crowned muses about Apollo

Stand like nine Corinthian columns singing

In clear evening.

She sees not the Lesbians kissing mouth

To mouth across lute strings, drunken with singing,

Nor the white feet of the Oceanides

Shining and unsandalled.

Before her go cryings and lamentations

Of barren women, a thunder of wings,

While ghosts of outcast Lethean women, lamenting,

Stiffen the twilight.

Biography

One of the 20th century’s greatest novelists, William Cuthbert Falkner, as his name was originally spelled, never graduated from high school. He was born in New Albany, Mississippi, the first of four sons, and moved with his family to Oxford, Mississippi, at the age of five. As a young man, influenced by the work of English poets A.E. Housman and Algernon Charles Swinburne, he began writing poems that explored Romantic themes . . .

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