Welsh Journals

Seventeenth-Century Sappho MIMI JOSEPHSON THE ARRIVAL of the exiled son of Charles I on the shores of Kent, in May, 1660, was hailed in rapturous metrical numbers by every English poet of the day. Dryden, Waller a score more 'Restoration voices' vied with each other in welcoming the return to England of 'His Most Sacred Majesty Charles II.' The poetic chorus was predominantly male. One feminine voice alone sang high and clear:- 0 greater now than Caesar's here: Whose veins a richer purple boast Than ever hero's yet engrost And these ecstatic lines came from Wales, from the pen of Katherine Philips, known to her friends as 'Orinda', the first English poetess. Throughout the years of the Protectorate, Katherine, an ardent Royalist, had lived quietly at her husband's home in Cardiganshire. Married to a strict Parliamentarian, she was forced to subdue her Royalist sympathies and tune her muse to more innocuous measures. 'Pretty fatt [sic], not tall, reddish-faced.' This not very prepossessing word picture of the poetess is to be found in John Aubrey's Brief Lives. But one or two paintings of her suggest that Aubrey may have been more malicious than truthful. Moreover, it was Katherine's charm and beauty of character, and the high moral tone of her verses, rather than her physical graces, which won her the esteem of her contemporaries and inspired, on her early death, a flood of eulogistic elegies. But if Appollo should design A woman laureate to make, Without dispute he would Orinda take Tho' Sappho and the famous Nine Stood by and did repine. This was Abraham Cowley's tribute. And Thomas Flatman, in his ode 'To the Memory of the Incomparable Orinda,' desired:- That when poor I this artless breath resign My dust shall have as much of poetry as thine.