As each beautiful form is to be conceived of as reflecting eternal
beauty from a slightly different angle, the poet may claim that flitting
affection is necessary to one who would gain as complete as possible
vision of ideality. Not only so, but this glimpsing of beauty through
first one mistress, then another, often seems to perform the function of
the mixed metaphor in freeing the soul from bondage to the sensual. This
is the interpretation of Sappho's fickleness most popular with our
writers, who give her the consciousness that Aphrodite, not flesh and
blood, is the object of her quest. In her case, unlike that of the
ordinary lover, the new passion does not involve the repudiation or
belittling of the one before. In Swinburne's _Anactoria_ Sappho
compares her sensations
Last year when I loved Atthis, and this year
When I love thee.
In Mackaye's _Sappho and Phaon_, when Alcaeus pleads for the love
of the poetess, she asserts of herself,
I doubt if ever she saw form of man
Or maiden either whom, being beautiful,
She hath not loved.
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