Who Was She?
I’d always been curious about Sappho, the idea of her, living a few hundred years before Christ, on a small island off Greece, with its own dialect and traditions, a poet and lyricist, that Plato later named “The Tenth Muse,” and she was known, even during her lifetime, as “The Poetess,” elevating her to Homer, whom they called ” The Poet.” Like most of us, I’d heard her name in connection with the term, Lesbian, and the poet, Sappho, as the origin. But when I started reading her poems, I forgot about that and was overwhelmed by their uniqueness and especially, their subjectivity. At that time, Epics, lengthy, third-person retellings of historic or legendary battles, were the subjects of poets, not the outpouring of personal emotions that I was finding in Sappho. I was moved by the simplicity of the first poem I read, “Evening Star”.
Hesperus
you bring
home everything
which light of day dispersed:
home the sheep herds
home the goat
home the mother’s darling
Looking it over, I saw the vastness of the star in the universe, then Hesperus, the god who personified it, bringing together from the darkness, all the creatures that had been sent out with the light: the sheep, the goats, and the ultimate home comer of all, the mother’s darling , small and last, but as significant to the mother as the great sky above. With simple language and a few familiar figures, Sappho has opened to the reader the warm feeling of a mother’s love.
As I went on to finish the collection, it became clear that Sappho’s overwhelming drive was for love–passionate love for women, for men, and above all, her worship of the Goddess of Love, Aphrodite. Poem # 31 expresses the exquisite depth of her desire:
. . . If I meet
you suddenly, I can’t
speak–my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin, seeing nothing,
hearing only my own ears
drumming, I drip with sweat.
trembling shakes my body
and I turn paler than
dry grass. At such times
death isn’t far from me
A biography of Sappho would be scant and much of it open to question. What we do know is that she lived in the years from about 610 B.C. to 570 B.C., that she was from a wealthy family, and had three brothers. As a child, she composed and sang her own poems: I took; my lyre and said/ Come now, my heavenly/ tortoise shell; become/ a speaking instrument” Later, she spent a year or so in Sicily to escape political problems on Lesbos and while there, a story arose that Sappho had thrown herself off the Leucadian promontory over her unreturned love for a beautiful ferryman named Phaon. This was never substantiated but inspired several romantic poems up until the Renaissance. She was the first poet to write in the first person and to express freely her strong emotions:
O false as fair
I am forgotten ,then, by thee!
Or haply on another shine
Pretense of love–all faithlessly
The eyes that once looked into mine
0ut! naught I care
For such as can true love betray!
Love on, forsworn, your little day:
Ye are naught to me.
Sappho was probably bisexual, but that didn’t become an issue in her poetry for 2500 years after her death.
It has been verified that she wrote around 10,000 lines of poetry. Three hundred years after her death, scholars in Alexandria compiled her works into 9 volumes, but today, only six hundred and fifty, mostly fragments, survive. The rest were burned by Pope Gregory in 380 A.D. and by Pope Gregory V11 in 1073.
It was not necessarily the homosexual content that caused the disapproval of the Church. Sappho wrote hymns to the pagan goddesses, especially Aphrodite, and these would have been as highly suspect as homosexual relations. During Sappho’s time, it is not clear what the attitude was, but we are clear that same-sex unions were not persecuted or forbidden. In the early Christian period, promiscuity was punished and that is probably part of what brought about the burnings. The focus on lesbianism in Sappho did not occur until the Victorian era, when that became the main interest in her poetry, in spite of textual evidence that she was heterosexual, as well:
Of course, I love you
but if you love me,
marry a young woman!
I couldn’t stand it
to live with a young
man, I being older
We get only a glimpse of Sappho’s relationship with her mother and daughter, Cleis. The few fragments that exist suggest it was close and good-hearted:
It’s no use,
Mother dear, I
can’t finish my
weaving
You may
blame Aphrodite
soft as she is
She has almost
killed me with
love for that boy
. . . and then a motherly Sappho as she scolds Cleis for inappropriate behavior:
Must I remind you, Cleis
that sounds of grief
are unbecoming in
a poet’s household?
and that they are not
suitable in ours?
. . .and on another gentler subject:
I have a daughter
Cleis, who is
like a golden
flower
I wouldn’t
take all Croesus’
kingdom, with love
thrown in, for her
What struck me as I was learning about Sappho was that I didn’t know who she was on the outside but I knew her almost intimately on the inside. With honesty and heart, she told the world of her passions, her thoughts, her love of life.
Although they are
only breath, words
which I command
are immortal
Poems that Shine 
Thank you for introducing me to Sappho, Judy. I love these poems! They’re delicate in a way and yet infused with passion. So few words convey so much. I wish we had more of her work.
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