Sappha – I Sleep Alone…

A lovely poem by an ancient Greek poetess Sappha who lived on the Isle of Lesbos and was famously called the “Tenth muse”, accompanied by a beautiful, magical painting of vivacious stars shining on the vibrant blue sky painted in psychedelic swirls. What seems to be an utter source of fascination for me, is that the same moon that Sappha had seen in those warm Mediterranean nights, is the same moon that Van Gogh had gazed at, in the absinthe-laced nights of Arles, or Percy Shelley, and look from your window, go for a late evening walk – you shall see the same lonely, bright, white face gazing at you with melancholic eyes, surrounded in glorious darkness, singing wistful songs to his nymphs the stars which flicker and flicker, until, consumed by their own light, they don’t vanish …. into eternity. We are but mortals, the moon – with no beginning or ending. So should one have pity for us mortals and our transience or for the Moon and his eternal loneliness?

Vincent van Gogh, Starry Night, 1889

“Well, the moon has set

And the Pleiades. It is the middle

Of the night. And the hour passes by,

But I sleep alone …….”

(Translated by Terry Walsh)