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From “Sappho Answers Aristotle”
First Woman. DO you share the present dread | |
| Of being sentimental? | |
| The world has flung its boutonnière | |
| Into the mud, and steps upon it | |
| With elaborate gestures! | 5 |
| Certain people do this neatly, | |
| Using solemn words for consolation: | |
| Others angrily stamp their feet, | |
| Striving to prove their strength. | |
| Second Woman. Sentimentality | 10 |
| Is the servant-girl of certain men | |
| And the wife of others. | |
| She scarcely ever flirts | |
| With creative minds, | |
| Striving also to become | 15 |
| Graceful and indiscreet. | |
| First Woman. Sappho and Aristotle | |
| Have wandered through the centuries, | |
| Dressed in an occasional novelty— | |
| A little twist of outward form. | 20 |
| They have always been ashamed | |
| To be caught in a friendly talk. | |
| Second Woman. When emotion and the mind | |
| Engage in deliberate conversation, | |
| One hundred nightingales | 25 |
| And intellectuals find a common ground, | |
| And curse the meeting of their slaves! | |
| First Woman. The mind must only play | |
| With polished relics of emotion, | |
| And the heart must never lighten | 30 |
| Burdens of the mind. | |
| Second Woman. I desire to be | |
| Irrelevant and voluble, | |
| Leaving my terse disgust for a moment. | |
| I have met an erudite poet. | 35 |
| With a northern hardness | |
| Motionless beneath his youthful robes. | |
| He shuns the quivering fluencies | |
| Of emotion, and shifts his dominoes | |
| Within a room of tortured angles. | 40 |
| But away from this creative room | |
| He sells himself to the whims | |
| Of his wife, a young virago | |
| With a calculating nose. | |
| Beneath the flagrant pose | 45 |
| Of his double life | |
| Emotion and the mind | |
| Look disconsolately at each other. | |
| First Woman. Lyrical abandon | |
| And mental cautiousness | 50 |
| Must not mingle to a magic | |
| Glowing, yet deliberate! | |
| Second Woman. Never spill your wine | |
| Upon a page of mathematics. | |
| Drink it decently | 55 |
| Within the usual tavern. | |
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