(Eris White)
IMMORTAL SOULS IN THE REALM OF POETRY
An ancient declaration once claimed: poetry is the art untouched by time. In today’s world—where things are so easily replaced and forgotten—such a belief may seem naïve. Yet if we approach poetry with reverence and a listening heart, the laughter of cynicism begins to fade. Even now, the image of a girl wearing a garland she braided by hand can still leave us breathless, just as it once moved Sappho to tears.
From the island of Lesbos in ancient Greece, Sappho – the legendary poet – etched an indelible mark into the soul of poetry. With vivid language, unflinching emotion, and a fiercely personal voice, her verse opens a rare doorway into the interior lives of women in antiquity. Writing in the Aeolic dialect of her homeland, Sappho wove lines that are at once tender and fierce poems of love, beauty, fragility, and human connection, rising and falling like silent yet unrelenting waves.
Her life was inseparable from Lesbos, where she lived among young women, composing verses of passion, jealousy, and desire. She loved them, wrote for them, and left traces so deep that, even after most of her work was lost in the fire that consumed the Library of Alexandria, the surviving fragments still stir generations of readers. We may not know her full story, but we know this: she loved, she wrote, and she turned her love into a living literary legacy. Even in pieces, Sappho emerges – not as a ghost of the past, but as a presence alive and unshaken. From Catullus to H.D., from classical Western poetry to modern Vietnamese five-syllable verse, Sappho’s whisper continues – like an ancient heartbeat that has never ceased.
Through the centuries, certain poets have kept reaching toward the luminous eternity that poetry promises. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle, 1886–1961), the American modernist and Imagist pioneer, was among them. In a society still silencing women’s voices, she embraced poetry as a path to reclaim the body, desire, and feminine unconscious. Through mythic imagery, water, light, and shattered forms, H.D. created verse that was not merely sound but ritual – a sacred dialogue across time, connecting her voice with Sappho’s. In translation, invocation, and almost mystical communion, she revived Sappho’s voice and declared: great artists do not exist outside history – they walk beside it, belonging to a world beyond time.
“Sappho and the drifting bodies” is not simply a translation of ancient verse, but a re-embodiment of Sappho in the voice of a modern H.D. Here, Sappho is no longer the exiled lesbian poet, but a symbol of the longing to transcend. These “drifting bodies” are not just female figures, but the body-as-language drowned in history’s silent ocean – of religion, ideology, and erasure. H.D. rescues them, rinses them in the silver light of a sacred space, and lets them speak, be heard, be loved, and beautifully shatter. Her modern five-syllable lines rise like waves against the shores of consciousness – sometimes tender, sometimes startled, sometimes cold as steel. She writes not to narrate, but to open, to deconstruct feeling – embracing the unspeakable as the very essence of poetic truth. Just as Sappho survives only in fragments, H.D.’s poems breathe through pauses, ruptures, silences – where the echo of emotion is all that remains.
H.D.’s life, too, was marked by personal and historical upheaval – love, loss, war, identity crises, psychological treatment. Yet from those storms, she drew the matter of her poetry: Greek figures, Sappho’s silhouette, voices from an unseen world she believed she could hear. Reading H.D., we do not merely encounter a poet – we meet a summoner, stepping into a sacred rite where language’s memory is reborn. There is an ancient poem that many have tried to translate – each version breathing a different soul into its confession: “I do not know what to do, my mind is divided.” Every translator, it seems, feels this very rift – between reason and feeling, silence and confession, desire’s flame and peace’s breeze. Each translation is more than a rendering – it is a return, a reliving of that moment when the soul splinters, then speaks.
And so, let us think of poetry as a field—where the mind and heart seek shelter. From the Greek word poietes—poet—comes the meaning “maker.” Each poem is a creation, a fold in the fabric of memory and feeling, where language calls us to reflect, to love, and to live more deeply. Sappho sowed the earliest seeds in that field. H.D. passed through, leaving behind a few silver blossoms. And we—today’s readers—are still walking there, still listening for the voices of those immortal souls who once lit up the sky of language.