Emanuela Kucik on Mary Robinson's "Her Last Appeal to Phaon"

Mary Robinson’s “Her Last Appeal to Phaon” is a Petrarchan sonnet with an ABBAABBA CDCDCD rhyme scheme. The poem references an Ancient Greek mythology legend in which the Greek lyric poet Sappho falls in love with Phaon, a boatman in Lesbos. According to legend, Phaon was old and ugly until Aphrodite came to his boat disguised as an ugly, evil-looking woman. Phaon ferried her to Asia Minor free of cost and in return, Aphrodite gave him beautifying ointment that made him appear young and beautiful. As a result, Sappho fell in love with Phaon; however, after they had sex, he eventually grew to resent her and desire other lovers, leading her to drown herself. While the mythological part of the story concerning Phaon clearly is not fact-based, many people question even the basic premise of the poet Sappho falling in love with a man because it was rumored that Sappho was a lesbian and that the legend may just have been an attempt to portray her as heterosexual. Nonetheless, Robinson’s poem deals with the end of the legend in which Sappho makes a final speech to Phaon before her suicide.
In her poem, Mary Robinson takes on the persona of Sappho and uses three critical formal features throughout the poem. In the octet, Robinson uses direct appeal and imagery to make us feel Sappho’s desperation for Phaon to give her another chance at love with him. In the sestet, Robinson employs her third formal feature, personification, while simultaneously using imagery, to convey Sappho’s message that she will no longer live for Phaon, but will die peacefully focusing only on the sun.
In the poem’s first four lines, Sappho directly appeals to Phaon through the word “thou.” She asks him directly if he “wilt…remember, and forbear to weep, [her] fatal fondness, and [her] peerless fame,” thus causing us to feel her desperation. Through these questions, Sappho’s pain is evident, as is her plea to get Phaon to listen to her. This pain and desperation is further emphasized by the use of imagery, such as the image of her body “deformed and mangled by the rocky deep,” a direct reference to how distorted her corpse would look if she drowned herself.
In the next four lines of the octet, Sappho adopts a technique of using mostly imagery to plead with Phaon. She furthers the imagery of her prospective drowning by discussing the winds and ocean sweeping over her body and her “eyes [being] ever closed in death’s cold sleep,” in an attempt to illicit sympathy from Phaon and a consequent second chance at love with him.
In the sestet, Sappho furthers her use of imagery by introducing the use of personification in describing the ocean’s rocks, wind, and waves by saying “if rocks grow kind, and winds and waves conspire, to bear me softly on the swelling sea.” Through this, she is simply describing her drowning through personification, as though any part of the decision is up to the rocks, wind, waves, and sea. However, this personification presents a less gory image of her drowning than the deformed corpse image presented in the octet. In the personification, the image of her death seems gentler, especially in the line “to bear me softly on the swelling sea.”
Through direct appeal, imagery, and personification, Robinson allows us to see Sappho’s progression from a desperate plea full of vivid, disturbing imagery to Phaon to come back to her, else she gruesomely kill herself, to a resignation to peacefully drowning herself and leaving Phaon behind. In the second to last line of the poem Sappho says “to Phoebus only will I tune my Lyre.” Since Phoebus is the sun-god, Sappho is saying that she no longer lives for Phaon. In fact, she will no longer be living at all; however, she ends the poem with a positive image of her death, saying that in death, she will focus only on the sun, not on Phaon or anyone else. As a whole, the sestet combines the direct appeal, imagery, and personification of the entire poem and essentially says that Sappho will be more peaceful in death through the sea than she was in life chasing Phaon, the lover who rejected her.