Efflorescences of Female Poets

This sketchy essay aims at little beyond description. Perhaps other readers will be intrigued with these poets, or the phenomenon of their appearing when they did. Further, these authors provide data for testing whether women’s writing differs in general from men’s.


     Upon being told of a female Quaker preacher, Dr. Johnson reacted, "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." His attitude was, like most of Johnson’s opinions, as reactionary as it was witty, but his asperity was doubtless due in part to the fact that in his own time that the issue of female speakers, writers, and intellectuals became contested. By the eighteenth century not only did female preachers appear; women writers were proliferating. Women made up a good percentage of both the authors and consumers of fiction, and they were just making their way into the list of the period’s poets.
     Yet, surveying the globe through all the centuries of literacy, in the written records of our species the voices of half the species are all but absent. Were there no other evidence of human culture, the record of literature would itself be sufficient to trace the patriarchal bias of civilization since the Bronze Age. Apart from the sporadic appearance of extraordinary individuals, there have been as well as some fascinating efflorescences of groups of female poets, blossoming out of societies that seem otherwise as male chauvinist as their geographical and chronological neighbors.
     In the Western tradition, doubtless the most celebrated female poet is Sappho whose reputation, though not much of her poetry, has survived the centuries. A towering figure very close to the beginning of European literature, she was called “the poetess” just as Homer was “the poet” (or, in more modern times, “the bard” means Shakespeare“). She was celebrated with statues and coins and called by at least three ancient poets “the tenth muse.” One of her most celebrated poems describes the physical manifestations of passion.
     

The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --

listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.

My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.

Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,

without you . .

     Her once substantial collected works have dwindled over time to a few scattered fragments with one single whole poem, standing almost miraculous amid the ruins. Indeed, the greater part of ancient Greek lyrical poetry as a whole has been lost, but nonetheless, Sappho was hardly a unique figure in her own day. Other female poets from the time are known, though some by little more than name and a few hints of reputation.
     Kleobulina (6th century BCE) is associated in legend with philosophers. She enjoyed sufficient celebrity that two comedies, one by Kratinos and one by Alexis, featured choruses of “Kleobulinas.” All that survives of her work are portions of three riddles. She seems to have specialized in these gnomic formulations which lie at the foundation of metaphor and poetry as a whole. Whether hers were profound or trivial or simply mysterious must be judged by a few examples. The solution to “a dead ass boxed my ear with his horned shin-bone” is a Phrygian flute. More ambitious and universal , though perhaps little more profound is a version of the year riddle, familiar from many sources including the Rig Veda and the Mahabharata: “There is one father and twelve children; of these each Has twice thirty daughters of different appearance: Some are white to look at and the others black in turn; They are immortal and yet they all fade away.” [1]
     Even in D. L. Page’s prose translation the reader hears an eloquent and natural voice in Erinna’s sixth century “Distaff,” written in memory of her childhood friend Baucis.

These traces of you, dear maid, lie still glowing in my heart : all that we once enjoyed, is embers now. We clung to our dolls in our chambers when we were girls, playing Young Wives, without a care. And towards dawn your Mother, who allotted wool to her attendant workwomen, came and called you to help with the salted meat. Oh, what a trembling the Bogy brought us then, when we were little ones! - On its head were huge ears, and it walked on all fours, and changed from one face to another!

      Among the others female poets who flourished in archaic and early Classical Greek times were Korinna, who according to Aelian and Suidas defeated Pindar five times in competitions. Her choral lyrics were performed by troupes of girls in partheneia; Megalostrata from the 7th century BCE, whom Alkman called a "golden-haired maiden enjoying the gift of the Muses", and Myrtis of the 6th century, first of a line of female Boeotian poets.
     These writers flourished and were not only accepted but celebrated by coinage and statuary as well as by critics. Though their culture was highly patriarchal, goddess-worship provided some occasion for female poetic agency. Thus Sappho’s lines are in a ritual as well as a psychological sense an offering to Aphrodite. Yet it would be a millennium and a half before Europe would see another such flowering of female poets.
     Among the written records of the remarkably luxuriant poetic growth of the south of France in the later Middle Ages are the names of twenty female troubadours or trobairitz. [2] The development of fin’ amors -- what came to be called courtly love in English – doubtless was influenced by Arabic poetry [3], Mariolatry, and the absence of men during the Crusades. Eventually romantic and artistic skills came to be included among the accomplishments required of a courtier.
     Five poems are extant attributed to the Comtessa de Dia, four cansos and a tenson. For one canso, “A chantar m’er de so qu’eu no volria,” music has survived as well. The poem is a complaint of an unsatisfied lover who feels that her beloved behaves toward her in a “proud,” standoffish manner (“orguoill”) while being “open-hearted“ (“franc”) with everyone else. Still, she remains steadfast in her own dedicated love, preserving her nobility and virtue while he betrays his own “great worth” (“rics pretz”) by failing to return her affection.

I must sing of that which I would rather not:
I am so aggrieved by him of whom I am the friend.
For I love him more than anything that be,
But pity and courtliness do not avail me with him,
Nor my beauty, nor my worth, nor my wits:
For I am thus tricked and betrayed
As I should be if I were ugly.

     The canso by Bieiris de Romans "Na Maria, pretz e fina valors" provides a dramatic example of the complex hermeneutic challenges these texts can present. The poem, clearly attributed to Bieiris de Romans, contains a suite of recognizable courtly love conventions, yet is addressed to a woman named Maria. Her peerless excellences, the poet says, elicit true love and a “pure heart” (“cor truan”). She begs for some sign that her love-service will be accepted. In the beloved the poet finds “gaiety and happiness” (“gajess’ e alegranssa”). [4] Scholars, puzzling over what to make of this poem, have sometimes attributed it to a male author or at any rate to a male persona. Some regard the poem as a straightforward expression of lesbianism, while others prefer to view it as an expression of intense but non-sexual friendship. Inevitably, the beloved has also been identified with the Virgin Mary. [5] To some the words of the poem seem a sincere heart’s overflowing, while to others they are ironic or a purely aesthetic game with little relation to lived experience.
     In Heian Japan (794-1185) two of the greatest writers were women. Murasaki Shikibu wrote the lyric-filled Tale of Genji of which Kenneth Rexroth says “most people who have read it agree that it is probably the world’s greatest novel.” [6] This masterful work combines the most intensely self-conscious aestheticism with a highly wrought eroticism and a mystical Buddhism, all from an almost painfully sensitive point of view, as refined as any page of Proust. The lovers, indeed most of the characters, exchange subtly significant verses, often heavily allusive; indeed, the entire book, long as it is, has a lyric sensibility.

Murasaki:
The troubled waters
are frozen fast.
Under clear heaven
moonlight and shadow
ebb and flow.

Answered by Prince Genji:
The memories of long love
gather like drifting snow,
poignant as the mandarin ducks
who float side by side in sleep. [7]

     Genji was so successful that it became itself the source of countless later references and works of visual art. Murasaki (the name is both the author’s pseudonym and the name of the heroine in the novel) also wrote a journal and a book of waka.
     In her diary, Murasaki says waspishly of one of her contemporaries: "Sei Shonagon is very arrogant. She thinks herself so clever and litters her writings with Chinese characters, but when you look at them carefully you will find many errors. Those who want to behave as if they were superior to others will lower their reputation. Will their future be brighter?" [8]
     Though Shonagon’s lyrics are included in contemporary anthologies, her Pillow Book, a sort of informal journal belonging to the Japanese genre zuhitsu, is her most well-known work. Her super-cultivated sensibility and the extraordinary refinement of the Heian court, are evident on every page. She compiles lists of “things that should be large” “Nothing annoys me so much,” she says as “someone who arrives at a ceremony in a shabby, poorly decorated carriage.” After including “rice starch that has become mixed with water” in a list of “things without merit,” she apologizes at length for mentioning such a vulgar item, saying “I never thought these notes would be read by anyone else.”
     Though she also wrote waka, the prose of the Pillow Book is highly poetic. The books opens with this passage.

In spring it is the dawn that is most beautiful. As the light creeps over the hills, their outlines are dyed a faint red and wisps of purplish cloud trail over them.
In summer the nights. Not only when the moon shines, but on the dark nights too, as the fireflies flit to and fro, and even when it rains, how beautiful it is. [9]

     In an example of a curious dialectic potential within sexist custom, women were not considered appropriate for the study of Chinese and the composition of prestigious Chinese poetry or kanshi, (though some acquired Chinese anyway). One result was that women writers concentrated on waka, in Japanese, and were thus likely to write more apparently natural and sincere verses than the practitioners of a learned and artificial tradition.  The breadth of participation  by women in the literary life of the time may be suggested by the title of Akazome Emon’s volume Thirty-Six Female Poetic Sages. Among the many other poets writing during the Heian era were Lady Ise who became concubine to Emperor Uda, the Princess Shikisi, and Izumi Shikibu considered by many the greatest poet of the time. [10]
     Though I claim no professional expertise in any of the three cultures in which these poets lived, I will nonetheless venture a few suggestions toward an explanation of their popularity. Ancient Greek, Heian Japan, and the Languedoc during the high Renaissance were all societies which placed an unusual value on the aesthetic. The refined cultivation of the pursuit of beauty is evident in such phenomena as the well-organized program of pleasures at ancient Greek symposia, the courts of love under Eleanor of Acquitaine, the Countess of Champagne, and others during the High Middle Ages, and the moon-viewing and poetry parties that originated in Heian era. These practices all imply a certain space for hedonism, though all include intellectual or artistic as well as corporeal pleasures.
     Undeniably each culture also has individual characteristics that may have been influential in making space for female poets: tolerance for homosexuality in archaic Greece, Buddhist aesthetics in Japan, Mariolatry and chivalry in the Western European Middle Ages. Critics have argued is whether certain of these texts represent authentic women’s voices or merely women who have gained acceptance by learning to compose patriarchal poetry. What cannot be disputed is that, in spite of their comparative silence through much of history, women have figured conspicuously in certain great eras of poetry. The phenomenon of these efflorescences of female poets and their individual works themselves deserve greater attention.




1. Both may be found on p. 165 Greek Elegy and Iambus I, J. M. Edmonds (Loeb Library).

2. The accessible text is Meg Bogin’s The Women Troubadours (W. W. Norton: New York and London, 1980). I acknowledge the substantial service she provided in assembling this volume, though I find her unreliable both as to facts and interpretations. She relied for texts on Oscar Schultz’s Die Provenzalischer Dichterinnen (Leipzig : G. Fock, 1888).

3. See Alois Nykl ‘s convincing Hispano-Arabic Poetry And Its Relations With The Old Provencal Troubadours.

4. The Consistori del Gay Saber "Consistory of the Gay Science") was a poetic institution founded at Toulouse in 1323 to foster the revival of Old Occitan verse.

5. Proponents of male authorship include François Zufferey, Oskar Schultz-Gora, Gianfranco Folena, Jean-Baptiste de Lacurne de Sainte-Palaye and Elizabeth W. Poe. Those who consider the work lesbian include Pierre Bec, Magda Bogin, Renat Nelli, and John Boswell, which an advocate of affection is Angelica Rieger.

6. “Tale of Genji” in Classics Revisited.

7. Kenneth Rexroth, Translations from the Japanese.

8. The Diary of Lady Murasaki, translated by Richard Bowring, 1996, Penguin, p. 54.

9. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated by Ivan Morris (Penguin), p. 201, 159, and 21.

10. Asian poetry was highly influential for European and American Imagism in the early twentieth century. Amy Lowell introduced a collection titled Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, translated by Annie Shepley Omori and Kochi Doi, with an introduction by Amy Lowell. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1920.

The Familiar Note in Poetry

     Reading Scott’s Marmion, I found the poetry thin and shallow, though fluent. While a Romantic in his involvement with love and the past, in his nationalism and use of folk materials, Scott was uninventive (if competent) in his handling of verse. Yet I found the dedicatory excurses that begin every canto refreshing, fresh, and entertaining. Their casual evocation of deep friendship and their informal commentary on history and the contemporary scene contrast with the highly conventionalized and nearly mythic plot line of the main narrative, rendering these passages, which some have found intrusive and inappropriate, more lively and convincing than the main body of the poem.
     I thought of other great poems which purport to be addressed to a specific individual and thus deal with what might seem to be private matters. Since all literature as such is circulated to a general readership, this pretense is a rhetorical pose, yet, like all rhetorical figures, it ideally contributes to the poem’s beauty, meaning, and effectiveness.
     When Sappho writes of love, it is rarely in the abstract. If not addressing Aphrodite, whom she conceives anthropomorphically, she writes a letter to Atthis or an intimate note to Anaktoria. Yet she performed these compositions at least semi-publically, and they were circulated and recorded by others who may well have known none of the principals in person. Similarly, we all have taken an interest in Horace’s best wishes for a safe voyage of his friend Vergil and Catullus’ invitation to Fabullus for a dinner, promising rewards beyond food. An illusion of intimacy arises from the poet’s familiar tone.
     The lineage of use of this device extends worldwide through history. Among its practitioners are such Tang Dynasty poets as Du Fu (for instance, for his “To Han the Censor” and “On Waiting for my Friend Ting”), troubadours employing such forms as the partimen and the tenso (such as the exchange between Marcabru and Uc Catola), Gay’s Epistles, Goldsmith’s “Verses in Reply to Dr. Baker’s Invitation” or his “Letter in Prose and Verse to Mrs. Bunbury.” The increasingly demotic idiom of modern poetry is congenial to this phenomenon. Though examples abound, I will mention only Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y.," Frank O’Hara’s “To the Harbormaster,” and Anne Waldman “A Phone Call from Frank O’Hara.”
     To present a poem as a note between friends suggests its “reality,” implying that it arose, not as an intentionally designed aesthetic object, a “thing made,” or poem, but rather as a natural byproduct of everyday life. This pretense of authenticity resembles that of early novelists who encoded their imaginative productions as journals or letters arising directly from lived experience. The familiar text thus playfully asserts its character as a private utterance at the same time as its writer and every reader know that it is not, creating a sort of shimmering illusory simulacrum of experience.
     Unreal as its consumers know it to be, this pose nonetheless dramatically supports a claim of sincerity. A note to a friend is assumed to be spontaneous and natural. The poet is using a version of the same device familiar from Sir Philip Sidney’s first sonnet in Astrophil and Stella which ends “’Fool,’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart, and write.’" This could be considered, of course, entirely a matter of convention, a literary pose with no implication of straightforwardness in the author’s lived experience. [1]
     Apart from sincerity, addressing a friend in poetry focuses on the value of love and comradeship, especially an affection heightened by a mutual verbal sophistication, a capacity for delight in words. Friendship is a major theme in poetry and rises to prominence in Chinese and late Latin lyrics, though less prominent today. The poems then remain in a realm lit by human affection. If it is not the fevered heat of romantic love, it signals what is perhaps a steadier, more sustainable flame, promising a potential of companionship and mutual support.
     By collapsing in the gap between the artistic and the natural, by acting as though poetic language is used in everyday exchanges, that a persona is identical with a historical individual, the writer is playfully suggesting the primacy of the cultivated poetic sensibility. The implication in the end is that life itself is aestheticized and unfolds in a realm of pattern, beauty, and significance. [2] In this sense the composition and consumption of aesthetic texts can be seen as a sort of sympathetic magic which strives by its verbal spells to impose order, grace, and meaning on the chaos of observed reality. In a sort of stealth technique, poets sometimes employ the most casual and unpretentious forms of discourse, words that present themselves as having little more weight than the trivia of daily conversation, hoping thereby to assure a life made livable by love and beauty.
     The playful uses to which words are put in poetry are the most sophisticated use of the distinctively human capacity to manipulate symbols. Like other forms of art, poetry is, among other things, a pastime: people, in part for the fun of it, practicing their greatest skill, enjoying the companionship of others who enjoy the same game, and thus passing the time as the sun declines in the heavens.

 

1. Important as it may be to the Romantic for whom art is self-expression, the issue can hardly exist for those to whom another’s subjectivity must remain forever unknown to the observer.

2. Ironically, taking the artificial to its limit as in a Renaissance dream vision such as Lydgate’s Temple of Glas has much the same effect. One might compare the division of labor in Lyrical Ballads, with Wordsworth striving to illuminate the hidden depths of the quotidian and Coleridge seeking what is significant to all in the exotic and remote. Both aimed by such a contrast to point readers’ minds in new directions.

The Birth of Erato: Lyric, Vision, and the Spread of Writing

     It is natural, perhaps, for modern lovers of poetry to romanticize ancient Greek lyric. For the Greeks, as for all early and oral cultures, poetry was the privileged form of discourse. All important data were encoded in poetry: love, religion, even knowledge, including history, science, and practical advice. Poetry was a major form of popular entertainment. The Greeks performed poetry at dinner parties, athletic contests, and public events. The entire population thrilled to tragedies, and the poet retained a portion of his archaic role as shaman. In contrast, in our present age, people consume poetry primarily through the media of popular music, advertising, bumper stickers, and graffiti. Mainstream culture depicts poetry as a “special interest,” slightly odd if not ridiculous or, at times, pedantic. A close reading of ancient Greek lyric allows the modern reader to recover, not merely the lovely, profound contours of the authors’ words, but also a grander view of poetry itself, a glimpse of its sublime potential.
     Poetry is universal. Though some cultures have no metals, some no pottery, and some lack the ability to control fire, all make use of refined verbal technologies. Among peoples for whom the “aesthetic” is not a category, the prestige of poetry can only arise from its usefulness. Poetry, with its figures of speech and multiple meanings, is the most densely meaningful form of signification.


1. The Earliest Art

     Judging by artifacts and what we know of present-day hunter-gatherers, palaeolithic humans constituted their identity primarily through roles, collectivities, and relationships. Thus an individual belonged to a certain tribe, to a clan within that group; he or she had a clear gender role, and perhaps possessed as well honorific status due to fighting or hunting ability, wisdom, descent, or seniority. In addition, every person was connected to others through a network of family relationships. Of course, people had individual characteristics, personalities, tastes, and views, just as they do today, but these were often invisible and always secondary in the subjective constitution of identity.
     Analogously in the arts of the Stone Age, convention ruled. Poets, potters, painters, and musicians tended to work in established forms whose principles were known, whose codes were familiar, and whose themes were accepted by the entire community. The artists were, nonetheless, individuals: some talented, some clumsy, some inventive, some slavish in following their models. Occasionally an artist twisted convention or overturned it or ignored it. These innovations might be imitated in their turn; more likely, they might be abandoned.
     There were surely individual love poems and laments, expressing authentic passion. Those who offended community standards would likely have been pilloried in satire until they changed their ways. Friends might well commemorate significant occasions with verse. These occasional productions were soon forgotten, though fragments of striking and clever language may have found their way into other work.
     The business of “professional” artists, however, was not personal utterance, but collective expression. For these early societies the artist acted as the undifferentiated intelligentsia: scientist, magician, fortune-teller, physician and metaphysician. Acting on behalf of the whole, he would advise in difficult situations, predict the future, assure good harvest, success in combat, or recovery from illness. It was the poet/shaman who provided coherence and significance to life by pronouncing the critical rituals, retelling the myths, lecturing on ethics and ultimate reality. He also made life more tolerable by providing entertainment.
     With the Neolithic move from the male-dominated hunt to the female territory of the cultivated plot arose goddess-centered fertility cults. The prey animals which had appeared in such marvelous plentitude on the cave walls at Trois Freres and Lascaux are replaced by cult figurines of women with ample breasts and buttocks. Empires and their urban capitals eventually arose in part to manage the water rights to the Tigris, Euphrates, and the Nile with minimal violence and to protect trade.
     The refinement of copper and then bronze and iron had little effect on farming. (Wooden plows, indeed, persisted in wide use into the twentieth century.) But metal did make more formidable arms, and the new technology of ore and smelter encouraged trade over large areas, requiring correspondingly greater political control at the same time that it fostered war and the coalescence of large empires. The conquering heroic patriarchal societies projected potent sky-gods that insist upon hegemony in heaven as well as earth. Jehovah is jealous of his rival gods, anxious to demonstrate his superior power (as in the magic competition between Moses, Aaron, and the Egyptians ), and Zeus dominates one locality after another by absorbing or demoting the local god and having sex with the goddess.
     By the sixth or seventh century before Christ, though, the authority of these sky-gods had been undermined by the persistent worship of chthonic deities (underground, indeed, and never eliminated), by the importation of dying and reborn gods such as Dionysos, Attis, Osiris, Inanna, and Persephone, and by the mystery cults that promised personal salvation (an attractive offer compared to a etiolated afterlife in Hades). Furthermore, people were aware of multiple notions of ultimate reality, and some of these metaphysicians were aware of others. No longer would a single tradition determine the boundaries of thought. The fences were breached; the souls were roaming.
     Writing had existed for three thousand years, but its use was spreading from the palaces to landowners and merchants. Commerce among nations was growing, though rapacious raids continued (and continue). Greece became a trading country, and thus a cosmopolitan one. Political ferment and class struggle resulted in the rise of tyrants to replace hereditary monarchs and oligarchs. People began to view history not wholly as divinely mandated fate, or in the light of the ancient heroes, but also as the willful creation of remarkable all-too-human humans.
     Concomitant with the change in consciousness arose the spread of writing. Writing requires of its adepts a narrow visual focus that departs from the generalized alertness of preliterate humankind. In addition, Plato reminds us that writing brought the death of memory. Though writing made possible the accumulation of a vast storehouse of experience, the collective memory of the great libraries (now further expanded with digital storage), it decimated individual memory. Part of consciousness can be externally stored and need not animate the individual who can look to authorities instead of knowing everything at once, including the mysteries.
     The arrival of writing necessarily transformed literature. The oral text has flexible form. Depending on the audience it may be edited for content or style. Even such a scripted spectacle as the circus varies in every performance. Its most fixed form is that constructed by the viewer. Each person’s experience, once registered, changes little, and every spectator’s response is shaped by the reactions of the group, the social conditions of reception (just as in a movie theater the viewer is more likely to laugh or gasp or drop a tear in concert with others). For a written text, the contradiction is reversed: the text never changes, but it invites a fresh construction from every reader. New meanings may always be adduced from the code, just as Augustine thought new readings of scripture may be as authentic as old. While a new reading may attempt to supplant an old one, more often it simply joins already existing readings. The poetic text glories in polysemy, whereas other forms of discourse seek simple clarity.
     Manguel points out that the classic tag “scripta manet, verba volat” is today taken to indicate the advantage of writing which “lives on” while spoken words vanish, whereas it originally suggested the opposite valuation: that spoken words have wings and can fly, in other words, they are inspired, in contrast to the dead and inert written words.
     Written culture was slow to come. Most readers mumbled the words if they did not read out loud. More than a thousand years after writing had become widespread and available not to an elite caste but to the well-to-do in general, Augustine is amazed to see Ambrose reading silently, and most poetry was performed aloud for another millennium after that.
     Homer, at the dawn of generalized literacy, presents us with a written text of a composition processed through centuries of oral performance. The question of Homer is vast, and substantial recent discoveries in the field of oral literature have provided more fruitful questions (not all the answers). Whether the identification is literally true or not, the reader must be startled when the author of the Homeric Hymn to Delian Apollo suddenly includes this boastful pitch, very nearly an advertisement: “Remember me in after time whenever any one of men on earth, a stranger who has seen and suffered much, comes here and asks of you: `Whom think ye, girls, is the sweetest singer that comes here, and in whom do you most delight?' Then answer, each and all, with one voice: `He is a blind man, and dwells in rocky Chios: his lays are evermore supreme.'” Around the seventh century B.C.E. we find the earliest demonstrably self-conscious artists, creators who feel they deserve a brand name.
     The change in material conditions is again associated with a change in verbal technology. Art, and, in particular, lyric poetry, becomes a snapshot of consciousness, no longer what all the group sees, but what the maker says the persona sees. Though poetry still purveys dogma and received truths, it also does the opposite: it opens up critical possibilities, it points toward ambiguities, contradictions, ambivalence to a degree unknown to earlier times. Preserving a moment of consciousness, lyric verse asserts the irrational that governs the greater part of our thought even in this twenty-first century. Poetry foregrounds sense impressions, the raw data of all our conclusions. Poetry arises from an impulse toward pleasure, and Freud was far from the first to recognize the fundamental role of what he called the pleasure principle. For all these reasons, Aristotle could make his celebrated claim that poetry is truer than history. Through the play and manipulation of symbols which distinguishes our species from the others, each so excellent in its way, people have found something like the Buddhist mindful here-and-now and, using these tools of words, have vaulted from the most immediate to the sublime. A poem, a “program” of words, has the power, as Longinus says, to “entrance” its consumer, to inspire “exaltation” and “joy.”


2. Archilochos

     The first named poetic personality in European literature is Archilochos, a mercenary and colonizer who died in battle during the seventh century B.C.E. Perhaps he assumed the vision of an outsider due to his birth from a slave mother (according to the traditional biography). At any rate, he is known as the first poets to use iambics, a meter strongly associated with satire and invective.
     Homeric culture is heroic. The Iliad centers about Achilles’ acceptance of his impending doom. When Andromache makes her humane plea to Hektor, he says he would feel shame before both men and women, were he to fail to fight with valor. He hopes rather, he says, to gain glory for himself and his family, fame that is the warrior’s immortality. The Spartan mothers are said to have told their sons to return from battle, either with their shields or upon them (i.e. having fought nobly or else dead). Even today we are expected to glorify the war-dead, and the citizen who shows little enthusiasm for the sentiment is suspect.
     In his most familiar poem, Archilochos directly contradicts the conventional pro patria et deo piety:

A Saian exults. He’s got the shield I left behind
in a bush, blameless, but against my will.
I got away myself. What’s the shield to me?
Forget it. I’ll get another no worse.

     Over the centuries, the reader feels the cool breeze of a broken taboo, a boundary crossed, the simple declaration of a fact known to all combat veterans but rarely admitted: that honor and valor coexist on the battlefield with panic and pissing in one’s pants and simple self-preservation. The difference is that the poet speaks with an individual voice, confident that his own vision, his concrete specifics, bear truth and demand attention. No longer a craftsman with rigidly prescribed skills writing for a committee of the whole, he is able to warble his own tune and follow it where it leads.
     The poem is not perceived more or less instantaneously like a painting or a building. Rather it unfolds over time, like music or a story. Archilochos’ poem is a kind of psychological cinematic montage. After the initial scene is sketched, it becomes a play of subjectivities. From imagining the Saian delighted at his booty, the mood shifts to the natural reaction of repugnance the Greek audience would have felt upon hearing of the lost shield. The deepening miasma is then suddenly contradicted by the single word: “blameless.” With some of the force of magic, the very pronunciation of the word makes it true. The admission, coming out of a certain military closeting, as it were, overwhelms the idée reçue. The warrior’s ego inheres in his will, and the poet admits loss, but still looks to the future, buoyed by his own individual conviction of merit, so secure he volunteers the tale of the lost shield as a paradoxical affirmation of his confidence and worth.
     Whereas Demodokos in the Odyssey is “instructor of the people,” repeating the vitally important principles that create the community, those things about which all agree, Archilochos is their critic. Meleagar called him “thorny.” After he died, the story spread that wasps hovered over his grave.


3. Alcman

     Originally, people regarded nature with awe. Animist beliefs found divinity in that other which they could not wholly control. When nature influences narrative in Homer, it is generally as a reflection of divine wills. Hesiod, on the other hand, a yeoman farmer rather than a landed gentleman, calls his community Ascra “a woebegone village, bad in winter, unbearable in summer, good at no time.” His entire effort was devoted to mastering nature, and he found the struggle taxing. For the later market agriculturalist animals and plants have economic reality. Their fertility, which had been illuminated with numinous potency, has become a matter of account book bottom lines. The ecstatic shamanism of the Upper Palaeolithic has deteriorated to a collection of prudential superstitions: for instance, it is taboo, Hesiod advises, to stand upright and face the sun while urinating; one should open new wine-jars on the 27th of the month.
     Alcman’s time doubtless considered itself less superstitious yet, but the ritual substratum persisted. Alcman wrote choral lyrics, meant to be performed as  (song and dance) by young girls under a male choirmaster. He refers to the male chorus leader as a “stallion.” In another piece, he laments the weakness of his [aged] limbs before his “girls of honey-sweet voices,” wishing he were a halcyon soaring with them over the sea. This is at once a realistic vignette suggesting freedom and energy, a wish for renewed sexuality, and a reference to the myth that claimed that the female halcyon would carry the male, when aged, on her back. In a way the choruses may resemble the entertainment world of today which elevates ever-young maidens to rejuvenate us all in imagination.
     He often praised specific members of his troupe (the leaders of his half-choirs of virgins Agido and Hagesikhora, for instance) by name. The glorious dance, the beautiful bodies, the concentration of élan vital are themselves redemptive. In Oedipus Tyrannos the chorus dances and sings: “when [shameful deeds] are held in esteem, why dance together?” The inverse proposition was equally reasonable to the Greeks: when people did dance, their ordered movements indicate (and help to create) an ordered cosmos, a harmonious world. Thus the viewers of the tragedy could find solace in the performance itself even as they contemplated dread events. The chorus dances, rather like an existential “man of action;” it “goes on” like Vladimir and Estragon in the face of death and dissolution. The lyric choir dances still, though for us the dance is encoded as black marks on a white page.
     The lyricist moves to recover a portion of the old mysterium tremendum. The precise details of nature, in Homeric poetry summoned to elaborate grand similes, here stand alone. He simply describes the scene, expecting that the facts, edited from raw sense impression, will be significant. The speaker is, of course, a persona and the picture doubtless owes much to earlier models, so the poem may be as much about other poems, other visions, other sensibilities, as about the scene before him, but it asserts verisimilitude. The gods are notably absent. Nature is apprehended in itself or as a projection of the viewer in a way familiar to us from Chinese and Japanese poetry. The poem is not so distant from hymns calling on deities and asking favors. Here the poet seeks sympathetic psychic rest by singing to sleep the marvels of creation, geological formations and fauna, but the last word goes to the wonders of the wholly natural. The poet invokes a sort of peace which passeth understanding, but the last word is spent in wonder at those miraculous yet ordinary objects: the wings of birds, birds that mediate between this world and another.

Sleep is on the mountains,
the peaks and the clefts,
headlands and torrents,
all those that walk the woods,
nursed by the black earth,
predators, mountain-bred,
and the race of bees,
and monsters from the sea’s purple depths!
Sleep on, you tribe of birds
with such long wings!


4. Sappho

     What could be more subjective and powerful than sexual love? The focus of most popular song today, it is also the most traditional topic of poets. Archilochos wrote a number of love lyrics (as well a number of thoroughly obscene verses ), and Alcman’s young choruses dance illuminated by an erotic nimbus, but for Sappho and her coterie, love is unapologetically central. Whatever else it may have been, Sappho’s thiasos was an association for the cultivation of sensibility reminiscent of Sei Sonagon and Lady Murasaki’s Heian Japan or Eleanor of Aquitaine’s Courts of Love in southern France. The old Victorian dodge of maintaining that she ran a school may have some truth, but it was hardly the sort of excuse they sought. We now admit the ancient Greek predeliction (very well documented in the case of men) for sex between adults and teens, but she seems to refer to adult women in references to some of her associates as hetaera which sounds like a term used among equals. In addition, she does not slight the power of heterosexual love: apart from her own marriage, she was known to have written an entire book of epithalamia.
     In the Phaedrus Socrates surprises his interlocutors with the claim that “our greatest goods come to us through madness,” but he quickly limits this: “assuming the madness is a gift of the gods.” All the varieties he describes are associated with poetry: prophetic madness (governed by Apollo), telestic madness (as in Dionysian ritual), poetic madness (Muses), and erotic possession (Aphrodite and Eros). Here the subjectivity in which we live is embraced and glorified as divine.
     And this is not simply the transport of love’s first blossom. Sappho’s work is filled with jealousy, petty backbiting, resentment of all sorts, but this is clearly part of love’s dialectic. confidence in one’s subjectivity, a vision for triangulation, capturing what Lawrence called the mystery of “the offering-up one yourself to the very great gods, the dark ones, and nothing else” by keeping precise and direct record of its visitation.

The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --

listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.

My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.

Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,

without you . . .

     Longinus praised this catalogue of physical symptoms of love, saying its power arises from describing the “most extreme and intense” signs of passion. The poem was translated (after a fashion) by Catullus and his version was translated by Sir Philip Sidney during the love-sonnet craze of the 16th century. In her intensity and single-minded focus, Sappho points toward the Platonic “ascent of love” from the individual beloved to the divine, later elaborated by Plotinus and the Victorines. As Longinus notes, the goal of poetry is not to persuade, but to entrance, to transport with wonder. This is an altogether different experience than being taught, persuaded or informed. The shamanic trance, the “Pentecostal” possession during group ceremonies, is replaced by an aesthetic experience, more idiosyncratic, but equally ambitious.


5. Conclusion

     With the spread of writing, the individual vision is preserved and privileged. The poet perceives the Olympians through the quotidian. The educated classes in particular lost some of the cosmic participation mystique which humans had cultivated through ritual and liturgy (i.e. through art) at least since they have been homo sapiens, and the new lyric, through the real, undeniable data of everyday life, revalued everything. Archilochus presents a dissent from social norms; Alcman a nonmythological but nonetheless still sanctified nature; and Sappho the incendiary irrationality of love.
     The genre of lyric poetry is distinguished from other forms of discourse not merely by extraordinary compression, but also by its ability (shared only with the other arts) to accurately represent human consciousness, properly privileging subjectivity, the irrational, sense impressions, and pleasure-seeking. Poetry also allows the expression of new ideas, contradictions, ambiguities, and ambivalence. Art provides the means for investigating the mysteries of god, love, and death. The thematic spectrum runs from those works that most affirm a society’s accepted truths (and this sort dominates in the oral age as well as in mass and popular media), and works that question the present order (these have been preserved since the dawn of writing, but have been preferred only since the Romantic era).
     A character in an ancient dialogue says of the reputation of a poet that he would live as long as “serving-lad bears round mixed wine for cups and deals bumpers about board, so long as maiden band does holy night-long service of the dance, so long as the scale-pan that is daughter of bronze sits upon the summit of the cottabus-pole ready for the throwing of the wine drops.” This in the face of inevitable suffering and death, in a cosmos finally unknowable, and thus subjectively unpredictable and absurd, a person chooses to drink, yes, and to take joy in the bodies of others (both the “serving-lad” and the “maiden[s]” offer up their youth), but also to socialize, to fling wine in an unlikely game with elaborate rules and to pass the time as well composing poetry.
     In my youth, the primary image of Greek antiquity was the fountainhead. In the old ethnocentric view, philosophy, aesthetics, democracy, values of tolerance and liberality, all good things flowed to us from the Periclean age. Europeans have made a variety of uses of the classics: the veneration of the medievals for whom antiquity regularly signified authority, Renaissance celebration of Greece to legitimize a new humanism, the 18th century Enlightenment thinkers who founded a new “cult of the muses,” the growth of scientific investigation which flowered in the philological rigor of Wilamowitz and then gave way to the decadent prose of John Addington Symonds and the poised academic swoon of Alma-Tadema’s paintings.
     Like all these predecessors, I would argue that my Greeks are the authentic Greeks. Like the lyric poets, indeed, like all of us, my own subjectivity provides my sole access to Truth.









The Muses

The muses arose in association with cult practice. For Pausanias the original muses are song, memory, and occasion (Μελέτη, also “practice”). This formulation implies ritual performance. Alcman and Mimnermus regard them as children of Gaia and Ouranos, and thus primeval. Much of the vocabulary of poetry points in the same direction: metrical “feet” began with dance steps, the “strophe” signified a physical turn, etc.
     To account for the later tradition that names Zeus and Mnemosyne as parents of the muses, Pausanias suggests there may have been two generations of muses. Of these the first may imply collective, altogether oral events, and the second, performances that were written, though (as the role of memory indicates) virtually always orally performed.
     The muses are actually a late systemization. Erato was especially associated with love poems and hymns. Among canonical nine there are muses for astronomy, history and for geometry. In the early era the muses’ realm was spacious, extending over the range of human culture (including scientific learning) through poetry, music, and dance. Through the metrical patterning of poetry, knowledge was given a gleam of the divine and preserved.
     Erato is the muse associated with lyric poetry, with the lyre (κιθάρα), with love poetry and hymns. In the tradition of late classicism Euterpe also governs lyric poetry, but she is generally depicted with a flute (the αὐλός).
     The muses sometimes reflect a Jungian anima, a subconscious wisdom that inspires the poet with vision. Graves, in his twentieth-century concept of the muse-poet, who through his art worships the Goddess, consciously recalls the ancient and the medieval in his attempt to revive this blend of the vatic and the erotic.
     Caveat lector: When they appeared to Hesiod as he watched his flocks, the muses said, “We know how to say many false things as though they were true, but we also know, when we choose to, to tell the truth.”

Posted by William Seaton at 8:16 AM

Sappho’s Holy Tortoise Shell: Eros and Poetry in Ancient Greece

     Sappho is an unusual writer in that, like Hemingway, her name is known to many who have never read a word of her work. Thus her reputation is a cultural force partially independent of her poetry. The facts about her are few, but treatment of her has never been limited to the facts.
     Sappho, or Psápphō (Ψάπφω) in her own Aiolic dialect, is an early Greek poet, who wrote centuries before the classical time of Periclean Athens. She lived in Lesbos, an island just off the Turkish coast, about 2600 years ago. It may well be that she didn’t actually leave written texts of her work herself, though writing was known in her time, but later editors collected her poetry into organized volumes. Her principal theme is love, love for other women, though she also wrote an entire book of marriage poems, and she is known to have had a husband and daughter. The bulk of her work has disappeared, with only those passages quoted in ancient books, fragments that could be deciphered from papyrus recovered from Egyptian trash-heaps, and a few lines from pottery still extant. Apart from the bits and pieces of her work, the facts of her biography, cobbled out of a handful of dubious references, are scant indeed, and add little to our reading of the poems. Doubtless she was an aristocrat and a friend of the poet Alkaios. She seems to have spent some time in political exile, and we may even know the names of some of her family members. Her brother seems to have been prey to his own love-madness which led to an embarrassing affair with an Egyptian courtesan.
     In the history of literature, Sappho contributed toward the definition of the lyric genre by her assertion of the primacy of the data of individual lived experience. Instead of writing genuine liturgical hymns for public use (or patriotic songs or general moralizing), she wrote about specific persons, specific feelings, specific days. At a time when much poetry was choral, and most art traditional and collective, she insisted on the irreducible value of her potentially subversive subjectivity. Like the troubadours, like Villon, and Frank O’Hara (as well as many others), she uses her own name, her friends’ names, and seems very much to write about her most intimate affairs.
     Part of poetry’s precision arises from just this close-up view of the author’s consciousness. The “truth” of experience is undeniable, while its interpretation is elusive. This perspective inevitably privileges the irrational, the subconscious, sense impressions, and the imperatives of desire. Most of us rarely acknowledge the extent to which we are governed by desire, while Sappho insisted on her eroticism; indeed, she deified it. Like many insightful artists from the makers of palaeolithic fetishes through Freud and the screenwriters for musicals in Bombay, Sappho realized that eros is, in the words of D. H. Lawrence, “of the great gods.” [1] As the first century author of On the Sublime says, “Sappho in her poetry always chooses the emotions attendant on the lover’s frenzy from among those which accompany this emotion in real life. And wherein does she demonstrate her excellence? In the skill with which she selects and fuses the most extreme and intense manifestations of these emotions.” [2] Yet, unlike some Provençal troubadours, her love was not idealized into ether, but rather altogether realistic, complete with selfish, envious, and vindictive thoughts, nonetheless divine despite all-too-human ego. In the great hymn to Aphrodite, pursuing a woman who rejects her, the goddess does not promise future bliss, but rather that Sappho will find acrid satisfaction of Schadenfreude when she can take her turn in rejecting the one she presently loves. Sappho can be cantankerous at the same time as she is sublime.
     Oddly, the element in Sappho that has attracted the greatest share of attention since antiquity – her apparent Lesbianism in the modern sense (we owe this usage, of course, to her reputation) – seems all but irrelevant to understanding her. So far as I can tell, her “gay” sensibility so closely corresponds to my own “straight” experience that the “othernesses” of nationality, era, personality, gender itself, all seem more significant.
     Yet for 2600 years Sappho’s sexual orientation has presented a conundrum to moralistic and misogynist critics. A celebrated poet active at the dawn of European culture, she was praised in the very highest terms by the best critics of ancient and modern times. Yet her explicit sexual preference for women, the theme of many of her poems, disturbed some readers from the start. Before long the cognitive dissonance was unbearable, and readers created an extraordinary body of calumnies, evasions, and myths [3] to avoid facing Sappho directly. A survey of such reactions, while it rarely sheds light on the poet, reveals a great deal about the history of sexism and homophobia. [4]
     Sappho’s prestige in the ancient literary world was unquestioned. Plato called her the “tenth Muse”5 and Antipater “the mortal Muse.” Longinus made one of her poems the centerpiece of his essay On the Sublime, and Dionysos of Halicarnassus likewise pointed to a poem by Sappho as a model of excellence in his On Literary Composition. A famous story (whose historical truth is irrelevant since its evidence as to her reputation is the same whether it originated with a statesman or a creative critic) has the great law-giver Solon so impressed with a Sapphic song that he said he was satisfied to die, having heard the beauty of her words. Meleagar called her works “few, but roses.” The most prestigious Roman poets – Horace, Catullus, and Ovid among others – paid homage to her art, beginning a tradition that extends to the present day. [6] She was honored in vase paintings (a few of which survive), statues, [7] and coins.
     For all that, in the generation following Sappho, the attacks on her reputation began. A poem attributed to Anacreon uses Lesbian in its modern meaning including a modern sneer:

Golden-haired Eros
tossed a purple ball my way
and asked me to play
with that young thing
in fancy sandals.

See, she comes from well-built Lesbos.
She can’t stand my white hair,
and ogles another girl.

     While this text might be read as satirizing the speaker who attributes his rejection to lesbianism rather than his age, the malice and distortion in Sappho’s image was soon unmistakable. Comedies with her name in the title were written by Diphilus, Aphippus, Ameipsias, Amphis, and Antiphanes. Menander was the first to tell the fanciful tale of the Leucadian leap. In this reworking of myth, [8] Sappho gave up her sexual preference at the sight of the handsome Phaon. Rejected by him, she killed herself by leaping off a cliff. [9] In this glorious suicide, both the poet and the “problem” of lesbianism die. In other comedies [10] she is depicted as a whore, a nymphomaniac, and, in general, a model of moral depravity rather than artistic achievement.
     Thus she was denounced in the second century A.D. by Tatian [11] as “a love-mad, whorish woman.” Some of the stories of Christian and Muslim moralists targeting Sappho’s works for censorship have been shown to be dubious or false, but it is clear that the great majority of her poems did not survive the destruction of the ancient libraries. [12]
     The split between literary praise and increasing popular ridicule and condemnation led Aelian (in 200 A.D.) to conclude that there must have been two different women of the same name in the same time and place. The encyclopedic Suda repeated this same notion centuries later, and it persisted into the 19th century.
     While there were surely no two Sapphos, the division of attitude persisted. She was praised by Boccaccio, Christine de Pisan, and Ariosto; in John Lyly’s play Sappho and Phaon, the author compliments Queen Elizabeth by associating her with Sappho. Donne refers to “the holy fire” of her verse. [13] Raphael managed to get her inside the Vatican by including her as the only mortal woman in the scene of Parnassus in the Stanza della Segnatura. Still, once her sexual preference became known, she was attacked by such prominent writers as Pope.
     In more modern times there have also been writers who glorified her as an outsider, a transgressor, a quasi-bohemian role model, and she became a heroine to aesthetes, decadents, and rebels as well as to gays. The French were particularly fond of this image, with Baudelaire [14] in the lead. Louys and Daudet wrote novels about her while in England, Swinburne declared her the greatest poet ever, and Symonds celebrated her in overripe prose, well worth reading.
     Scholars and critics, too, participate in the prejudices of their cultures. Some of the most expert professors exercised immense ingenuity to understand how an undoubtedly great poet, endorsed by the best ancient authorities, could seem, on the face of it, to be guilty of the most unthinkable immorality. Thus Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, toward the beginning of the last century, was so gallant as to propose the notion that Sappho operated a school associated with a religious cult. Thus she was made as respectable as a headmistress, which to Wilamowitz-Moellendorf, was surely respectable indeed, and what had looked like erotic enthusiasm for millennia, became professional concern, perhaps slightly warmed by maternal feeling. Robinson indignantly maintains that her very artistic excellence precludes her homosexualityand even her capable modern editor, while he must concede the passionate character of her attachments, insists tortuously that there is no evidence of her having actually acted on her impulses! [15]
     But it is time to bring Sappho to this new stage in my own words. Though she has been translated countless times, I suppose my own motives for producing yet more versions resemble those of Kenneth Rexroth, who speaks of his “ecstasy” when first translating Sappho, and says, “what matters most is sympathy – the ability to project into Sappho’s experience and then to transmit it back into one’s own idiom with maximum viability.”16 The imaginative projection across the miles, the years, and the very real gaps of personality, gender and sexual orientation I believe I have managed. As for the “viability,” only those who hear these poems can judge.


1 In “Benjamin Franklin,” Studies in Classic American Literature.

2 Chapter 10.

3 Among the fuller treatments of her reputation are the traditional David M. Robinson, Sappho and her Influence (George Harrap & Co., London, 1925) and the more modern Joan DeJean’s Fictions of Sappho 1546-1937 (University of Chicago, Chicago, 1989). A broader, less scholarly narrative emerges in Margaret Reynold’s A Sappho Companion.

4 See Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality for the best general source for attitudes toward homosexuality in the ancient world, though its value for Sappho is limited by the facts that Boswell has little to say about gay women, and his principle chronological focus is in the Christian era. Still, he documents such striking points as the fact that neither Greek nor Latin even had a word corresponding to the English “homosexuality” (itself invented only a century ago).

5 This is the name of a bar in Mytilene today. Present-day Mytilene has also a Hotel Sappho and a taverna offering “Aphrodite Home-Cooking.”

6 The most recent example being Erica Jong’s novel Sappho’s Leap.

7 The one in Syracuse was inscribed “I surpassed women in poetry as greatly as Homer surpassed men.” Today a modern statue of the poet stands at quayside in Mytilene.

8 Phaon is an epithet of Adonis, and the mythic origins of the story have many parallels.

9 Since this story was repeated by Ovid, it became better known for the Middle Ages than Sappho’s own work. Other comedies, while not including her name in the title, did include references to Phaon or Leucadia, and thus may reasonably be considered treatments of the theme of Sappho.

10 None exists in its entirety, but plot summaries and quotations are extant from several.

11 Once a significant Christian missionary, Tatian is now regarded as a heretic. To him, even marriage is a form of fornication.
12 Other factors also led to the loss of her work: the preference of later ancient writers for Attic dialect instead of Sappho’s Aeolian, the sack of Constantinople by crusaders in 1204, and, of course, the general ravages of time.

13 in “Sappho to Philaenis,” where the fact of her lover’s femaleness seems not to trouble Donne in the least.

14 He had originally planned to call Les Fleurs du Mal Les Lesbiennes, and it is the poems on lesbian themes that brought down censorship.

15 Denys Page. Sappho and Alcaeus: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient Lesbian Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1955. p. 144. Page was troubled by phrases speaking of her sleeping with her beloved, but he prefers, he says, retreating into Latin, not to take these “in malam partem.” This thoughtful reaction foundered, though, in the face of new fragments which seem to speak of a lover “wet as pasture”, and of a leather dildo (“receivers of the dildo,”  in fr. 99.5), so he simply concludes, “There would be more to say on this topic if the Alexandrian collection of Sappho’s poems had survived intact.” Indeed, but would Page find the voice to say it?

16 The first quotation is from p. 154 of An Autobiographical Novel. Garden City: Doubleday, 1966. The second from p. 28 “The Poet as Translator.” Assays. New York: New Directions, 1961.


I tell you straight: I would be dead.
Leaving me, she wept

so much and told me this:
"What awful woe we have, Sappho!
I swear I go against my will."

Atthis, you know our love Anaktoria,
although she lives in Sardis far away,
she thinks of us a thousand times a day,

of when we used to take our time together
and she thought yours a goddess' face.
Your singing was a thing she loved to hear.

And now her light among Lydian women
is just like when the rosy-fingered moon,
shining after setting of the sun,

pours out a light that overwhelms the stars
and flashes on the sea as bright
as its flood of light on fields thick with flowers.

Transparent dew then settles on the earth
and fills the rose and thyme with life
and also clover, rich in honey.

Often though she's far away,
our lover thinks of Atthis' love.
Exquisite longing grips her heart.

She calls for us to come. We hear --
for many tongues of night
relay her call across the sea.

Sappho (Lobel and Page 96)



And then I answered her and said,
"Rejoice and go. Remember me.
You know how we all cared for you.

If not, then I'd recall your thoughts
of good times we've gone through.

Wreaths of roses, wreaths of violets,
at my side you put them on,

woven wreaths around your tender neck.

And you took perfume fit for queens
and rubbed it on . . .

Lying on soft beds
you'd satisfy desire.

Sappho (83)


Sappho, I tell you, you'll lose my love
if you keep this up.

Oh, pull your shapely body out of bed,
take off your Chian robe and bathe
like a simple lily by a stream.

Kleis will bring us saffron robes
and dark clothes from the cedar chest,
and all just for our joy.

You'll get a fresh dress,
a flower wreath to crown your charms,
those charms that make me mad.

Praxinoa'll roast up nuts
and I will bring a proper drink --
we'll make a party fit for gods!

All this will come when you, most beautiful
of women, return, bringing joy
to the white city of Mytilene.

It'll be just like it was, like a mother
with her children. Just think --
and remember the days we've passed.

Sappho (82)


The moon and the Pleiades
gone down, middle of the night now.
Time passes;
I lie alone.

Sappho (6)


Immortal Zeus-born Aphrodite,
weaving wiles on a rich-wrought throne.
I'm your supplicant. Give me now
no further grief.

But come -- if ever you heard
my call from far and hitched
a chariot to leave
Zeus' golden home.

Fine swift sparrows thickly beating
strong wings over land
and under heaven brought you
to the black earth.

Once come, blessed goddess
with a timeless smile
you'll ask, "What now
that you need me?

What'll I do, wild heart?
Who'll feel the snare of your love?
Tell me now, Sappho,
who's done you wrong?

If she flees, soon she'll follow.
Having spurned your gifts, she'll
offer the more to you. Indifferent now --
she'll love you soon."

Come to me then and chase
my blues away. Lend
your help to grant my heart
its joy.

Sappho (28)


Virgins . . .
all night long . . .
we’ll sing of you and your young lover
(violets between her thighs).

So rouse your brothers, man,
and hit the streets with them.
Tonight we'll know less sleep
than the clear-voiced bird.

Sappho (Lobel and Page 30)


The man's all but a god
who sits with you and pays such heed
to your sweet talk
and lovely laugh --

listening excites me --
my heart's at odds, unsettled.
And when I look at you my mouth
can't form a word.

My tongue stopped, I'm filled
with thin flames -- vision fades,
and my ears hear the beating
of my blood.

Cold sweat on my side, I'm taken
with trembling and blanch like straw.
Little short of death,
I must last it out,

without you . . .

Sappho (2)