Κῶμα is something more than ordinary sleep; it is deeper with a quality of oblivion in it, and so differs from ὕπνος, the more ordinary term. Poe in the “Haunted Palace” approaches this, when he writes:
Banners—yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow.
(This, all this was in the olden
Time long ago).
But here there is just a suggestion of effort which is absent from the work of Sappho.
In 1903 J. R. Tutin published at Cottingham, near Hull, a small pamphlet in gray wrappers, which contained various selected translations of most of the Sapphic fragments, but without commentary and without Greek text. There is a short prefatory note explaining the reasons for the issue of the compilation.
One of the most recent and comprehensive discourses on the subject of Sappho is a lecture by Professor Tucker, of Melbourne, delivered in 1913 before the Classical Association of Victoria, and published in 1914. It is an appreciative and discriminating thesis, and among its other good points it gives short shrift to the Leucadian rock story and to the scandals of the Greek comic writers and their Roman plagiarists in this connection. Not much attention is given to English translations, except in using them to illustrate comparative poetical construction and form. This practically exhausts the list of works in English upon Sappho and her poetry and its particular metre. Everything she wrote was of course not in the metre with which her name is associated. She used Alcaic, Choriambic and others occasionly, but as we have seen, the important fragments are in her own Sapphic. The soft Aeolic variety of Greek was a fitting medium for the rich and sensuous language and imagery of her poems, and the result is perhaps more pleasing than would have been the case, had the circumstances of time and place caused her to use the
