The Poetry of Sappho

After the success of Homeric epic poetry in Ancient Greece, a new kind of writing began to bloom: lyric poetry. One of the most famous lyric poets in ancient Greece was Sappho.  Sappho's poems use her own voice to tell the story of her own experiences.  She insists that daily life and love are every bit as worthy of poetry as the martial splendors and stories of gods found in earlier epics.

Originally, lyric poetry was poetry sung to the accompaniment of a lyre, and possibly performed with the help of mimes and dancers.  Soon, however, lyric came to mean short, personal and immediate poems which could use a variety of meters.  Sappho wrote with what translator Mary Barnard (1958) calls a "fresh colloquial directness." Maurice Bowra says Sappho's language is "ordinary speech raised to the highest level of expressiveness." And Dudley Fitts argues that both Sappho's work and Mary Barnard's translation "is stripped and hard, awkward with the fine awkwardness of truth."  Paul Roche says her poems have a "sharpness and jewelry of sound": "plain and ornate at the same time, in the same line, in the very same phrase."

Only two complete poems of Sappho's still exist--and one of the two was found only a couple of years ago.  A few others seem very close to complete. Others poems are merely fragments.  A few are bits of Sappho's work quoted in later authors' texts.  Many poems were found on degraded papyrus--many of which had been torn into strips to make wrappings for mummies, or were faded and then turned into usable paper.  Some of these were preserved only because they were in very dry ancient trash heaps in the deserts of Egypt.

A century ago, archaeologists began to collect  these postage-stamp size bits of ancient papyrus and sent them to England.  As Jeanette Winterson writes while channeling the spirit of Sappho, "WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH MY POEMS?  When I turn the pages of my manuscripts my fingers crumble the paper, the paper breaks up in burnt folds, the paper colours my palms yellow."

Some of Sappho's poems present an impressionistic view of nature.  I love these lines (translated by Mary Barnard) personifying the morning light:

3. Standing by my bed

In gold sandals

Dawn that very

moment awoke me.

and these about the evening light:

24. Awed by her splendor

Stars near the lovely

moon cover their own

bright faces

                when she

is roundest and lights

earth with her silver

* * *

Several extant fragments show Sappho confronting with the issues of mortality--the issue with which both Gilgamesh and Achilles struggle. Just as the two men come to understand, Sappho knows that while her body will die, her memory will live on.  That is, the body is mortal but nevertheless the self can become immortal.

60. You may forget but

Let me tell you

this: someone in

some future time

will think of us

and, more obviously:

100. I have no complaint

Prosperity that

the Golden Muses

gave me was no

delusion: dead, I

won't be forgotten

Gilgamesh hoped to be remembered as the great king of a great city.  Achilles knew he would be remembered as a magnificent warrior-hero.  But Sappho knows that she will be remembered because of her poetry. As she writes in fragment 9, "Words which I command are immortal."

*  *  *

In the next post, I'll discuss Sappho the Lesbian.