Sappho #

Sappho was an educated Greek aristocratic lady, assumed to be married to a businessman, living on the island of Lesbos, in the late Homeric period. Most women were precluded from education as they were deemed inappropriate. She is an exception.

She appears to have written about 10,000 lines of poetry of which we have fragments of only 600 lines. Pope Gregory, circa 1000 AD, had many of her poems burned.

Sappho innovated lyric poetry both in technique and style, writing poetry from the point of view of gods and muses to the personal vantage point of the individual, writing from the first person, describing love and loss as it affected her personally. She drew her subjects from the privacy of her emotions. She frequently uses the personal pronouns - I, me, my, you and your.

Her style was sensual and melodic; primarily songs of love, yearning, and reflection. Most commonly the target of her affections was female,

Plato elevated her from the status of great lyric poet to the tenth muse. Upon hearing one of her songs, Solon, an Athenian ruler, lawyer, and a poet himself, asked that he be taught the song “Because I want to learn it and die.”

C.M Bowra claims the Greeks regarded love as something irresistible, even merciless and savage - think Leda and the Swan. Men attributed little tenderness to it. Sappho knows that it is a bitter-sweet inescapble creature like the wind on an oak but it has incalculable rewards, the gentle loving times it brings. It all the sweeter when it is not self-indulgent or cloying.

While most of her poems appear to be about female love - lesbian or homo-erotic poetry, she also wrote love poems to men as well.

The paradox of Sappho’s art is though she is moved deeply by physical passion, the physical aspect disappears in her treatment of them.

There is nothing ultimately possesive in her love as she realises that marriage is the right and inevitable end for those she expresses her feelings.

Yet many of her songs depict the pain of dark hours of regret and parting. She finds relief in her songs about young girls who have left her to be married and of the emptiness within her wanting to die. But she recovers by recalling the happy hours they spent together and even writes wedding songs for them. She compares a girls to a hyacinth which a shepherd treads on with the purple blossom falling to the ground.

Her scenes of the physical world are clearly described. She enumerates the flowers, young men as saplings, stars hiding their faces and calls nightingales the love-voiced hearalds of spring.

Unlike Enheduanna, Sappho never held an official post as priestess to the gods.

C.M. Bowra - Landmarks in Greek Literature.

To Atthis #

(tr. Willis Barnstone)

I have not had one word from her
Frankly I wish I were dead
When she left, she wept

a great deal; she said to me,
“This parting must be endured,
Sappho. I go unwillingly.”

I said, “Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love

“If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared

“all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck

“myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them

“while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song…”

–Translated by Mary Barnard

Please #

Come back to me, Gongyla, here tonight,
You, my rose, with your Lydian lyre.
There hovers forever around you delight:
A beauty desired.

Even your garment plunders my eyes.
I am enchanted: I who once
Complained to the Cyprus-born goddess,
Whom I now beseech

Never to let this lose me grace
But rather bring you back to me:
Amongst all mortal women the one
I most wish to see.

–Translated by Paul Roche

The Anactoria Poem #

Sappho was well aware that her tastes were different than men in that they focus on the personal passions of women and devotion to Aphrodite.

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what-
ever you love best.

And it’s easy to make this understood by
everyone, for she who surpassed all human
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
husband—that best of

men—went sailing off to the shores of Troy and
never spent a thought on her child or loving
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
left her to wander,

she forgot them all, she could not remember
anything but longing, and lightly straying
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
now: Anactória,

she’s not here, and I’d rather see her lovely
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
glittering armor.

This poem compares and contrasts War and love with its oblique references to Homer’s The Iliad and comparing Anactoria to Helen of Troy.

The poem is addressed to an audience, but not to Anactoria, who seems absent with some sense of loss and bitterness on the part of the poet.

The Ode To Aphrodite. #

“To my side:
“And whom should Persuasion summon
Here, to soothe the sting of your passion this time?
Who is now abusing you, Sappho?
Who is Treating you cruelly?

Now she runs away, but she’ll soon pursue you;
Gifts she now rejects–soon enough she’ll give them;
Now she doesn’t love you, but soon her heart will
Burn, though unwilling.”

The poem is a prayer to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, where Sappho asks for help in getting attention from an unnamed woman, for which Sappho has fallen in love.

Ten lines: #

“What cannot be said will be wept.”

“May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve.”

“Once again love drives me on, that loosener of limbs, bittersweet creature against which nothing can be done.”

“You may blame Aphrodite, soft as she is, she has almost killed me with love for that boy.”

“Virginity, virginity, when you leave me, where do you go? I am gone and never come back to you. I never return.”

“When wrath runs rampage in your heart you must hold still that rambunctious tongue!”

“The moon and the Pleiades have set, it is midnight, and the time is passing, but I sleep alone.”

“All the violet tiaras, braided rosebuds, dill and crocus twined around your young neck.”

“Someone will remember us, I say; even in another time.”

Many other poets in the past 500 years have also written about Sappho, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Amy Lowell and others.

See: Burning Sappho - Gwen Harwood:

https://nebo-lit.com/poetry/harwood/harwood-in-the-park.html#burning-sappho

It is a good thing to be
rich and to be strong,
but it is a better thing
to be loved.

Euripides

NASRULLAH MAMBROL writes:

John Donne also composes a poem to Sappho. In Sapho to Philænis Donne speaks in the voice of a woman, the classical Greek poet, Sapho, author of astonishingly passionate lesbian love poetry.

The poem has provoked considerable critical controversy. Some critics have argued that Donne could not have written a lesbian love poem. Others have argued that it is an exploitative male fantasy of female sexuality. Donne finds in Sapho a classical antecedent and a poetic guise through which he can represent female self-expression, artistic, emotional, and sexual.

Sapho’s verse letter is addressed to her current but absent female lover, Philænis, whose name is the Greek word for female friend.12

In a moment of jealousy, Sapho imagines Philænis with a new lover, a young boy:

Plaies some soft boy with thee, oh there wants yet
A mutuall feeling which should sweeten it. (31–32)

To forestall the competition, Sapho reminds Philænis that this faceless, archetypal young boy lacks the ‘‘mutuall feeling’’ that enables Sapho and Philænis to give each other such sweet pleasure.

Traditional Renaissance poets catalogue and metaphorize each body part, but Sapho abjures comparisons as trite and tedious distractions from the frank and open relationship she and Philænis share:

For, if we justly call each silly man
A little world, What shall we call thee than?
Thou art not soft, and cleare, and strait, and faire,
As Down, as Stars, Cedars, and Lillies are,
But thy right hand, and cheek, and eye, only
Are like thy other hand, and cheek, and eye. (19–24)

The bare, unadorned nouns – hand, cheek, and eye – dismiss the elaborate poetic tropes by means of which male poets objectify female love objects. It is the female body in and of itself that moves Sapho to poetry and sexual ecstasy. At the climax of the poem Sapho gazes at herself in a mirror:

Likenesse begets such strange selfe flatterie,
That touching my selfe, all seemes done to thee.
My selfe I embrace, and mine owne hands I kisse,
And amorously thanke my selfe for this.
Me, in my glasse, I call thee; But alas,
When I would kisse, teares dimme mine eyes, and glasse. (51–56)

From Gender Matters: The Women in Donne’s Poems By NASRULLAH MAMBROL