When something wonderful happens, you can’t wait to tell them about it, knowing they will share in your excitement. You share hopes for the future, dreams that will never come true, goals that were never achieved and the many disappointments life has thrown at you. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more. Grant thou now.“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. Soon shall be giving gifts who now rejects them.Įven though now he love not, soon shall he love theeĬome then now, dear goddess, and release me "For, though now he flies, he soon shall follow, Now win over and lead to thy love, my Sappho? "Whom," thou criest, "dost wish that sweet Persuasion What for my maddened heart I most was longing. Then thou, O blessed goddess,Īll in smiling wreathed thy face immortal,īade me tell thee the cause of all my suffering, Waving their thick wings from the highest heaven Swift to the darksome earth their course directing, Heard'st and camest, leaving thy glorious father's Palace golden, When from afar thou heard'st my voice lamenting, Slay me not in this distress and anguish, Read more →Ĭhild of Zeus, Enchantress, I implore thee Many critics and readers alike have responded to the personal tone and urgency of her verses, and an abundance of translations of her fragments are available today. They speak simply and directly to the "bittersweet" difficulties of love. Rather than addressing the gods or recounting epic narratives such as those of Homer, Sappho's verses speak from one individual to another.
Most of her poems were meant to be sung by one person to the accompaniment of the lyre (hence the name, "lyric" poetry). Sappho is not only one of the few women poets we know of from antiquity, but also is one of the greatest lyric poets from any age. Her poems about Eros, however, speak with equal force to men as well as to women. Because social norms in ancient Greece differed from those of today and because so little is actually known of her life, it is difficult to unequivocally answer such claims. Her reputation for licentiousness would cause Pope Gregory to burn her work in 1073. This characterization held fast, so much so that the very term "lesbian" is derived from the name of her home island. Three centuries after her death the writers of the New Comedy parodied Sappho as both overly promiscuous and lesbian. In 1914 in Egypt, archeologists discovered papier-mâché coffins made from scraps of paper that contained more verse fragments attributed to Sappho. In 1898 scholars unearthed papyri that contained fragments of her poems. Merely one twenty-eight-line poem of hers has survived intact, and she was known principally through quotations found in the works of other authors until the nineteenth century. Her poems were first collected into nine volumes around the third century B.C., but her work was lost almost entirely for many years.
It is unclear whether she invented or simply refined the meter of her day, but today it is known as "Sapphic" meter. She was known in antiquity as a great poet: Plato called her "the tenth Muse" and her likeness appeared on coins.
Other historians pThe history of her poems is as speculative as that of her biography. A legend from Ovid suggests that she threw herself from a cliff when her heart was broken by Phaon, a young sailor, and died at an early age. Sappho's school devoted itself to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, and Sappho earned great prominence as a dedicated teacher and poet. She spent most of her adult life in the city of Mytilene on Lesbos where she ran an academy for unmarried young women. Evidence suggests that she had several brothers, married a wealthy man named Cercylas, and had a daughter named Cleis. to an aristocratic family on the Greek island of Lesbos. Only a handful of details are known about the life of Sappho.
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