Love, a Little Short of Dying

Sappho's heroic language of unrequited desire

φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν' ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνείσ-
ας ὐπακούει

καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν, τό μ' ἦ μὰν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν·
ὠς γὰρ ἔς σ' ἴδω βρόχε', ὤς με φώναίσ'
οὐδ' ἒν ἔτ' εἴκει,

ἀλλά κὰμ μὲν γλῶσσα †ἔαγε†, λέπτον
δ' αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ' οὐδ' ἒν ὄρημμ', ἐπιρρόμ-
βεισι δ' ἄκουαι,

κὰδ' δέ ἴδρως κακχέεται, τρόμος δὲ
παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
ἔμμι, τεθνάκην δ' ὀλίγω 'πιδεύης
φαίνομ' ἔμ' αὔτᾳ.

ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον, ἐπεὶ †καὶ πένητα†...

That man seems like a god
whoever sits opposite you
and hears you speaking sweetly, close

and laughing seductively, which sets
my heart fluttering in my chest.
When I look at you briefly, I can no longer speak.

But my tongue breaks, and thin
fire runs straight under my skin,
My eyes cannot see, and my ears thrum,

Sweat pours down, and trembling
seizes all of me, and I am more pale
than grass; I seem little short of dying.

But all must be endured, for even poor….

Of the love poetry that has come to us from antiquity, fragment 31 from Sappho is, to me, simply astonishing. Much of the imagery in the poem has become standard for later Greek, Roman, and English love poetry; but several aspects of Sappho’s poem always feel fresh to me, always capture that partly literary, wholly emotional sense of overwhelming love and desire.

First, there is the situation.  The poem begins with “that man” and it seems like the poem will be about him.  But no, he doesn’t matter at all, as it turns out.  He only “seems equal to the gods” because he is sitting opposite you (who is this you? We never learn).  And as Jack Winkler pointed out, he isn’t anyone in particular.  In the second line, he’s referred to with an indefinite pronoun – whoever gets to sit next to you, listening to your erotic laugh, he is elevated to near-divine status. 

And then the poem moves into an entirely personal experience of the speaker (Sappho) as she responds to watching her crush speak softly and laugh seductively.  That response is a full-body breakdown, involving nearly all of the senses: skin on fire, heart fluttering, sweat pouring down, ears thrumming, eyes failing.  (If we count the “speaking sweetly” from the earlier part of the poem, taste and smell are invoked metaphorically as well).  Most of these images have come to be standard in love poetry, but in Sappho they hit hard, in part because of the remarkable pile-up of physical sensations. 

What may not be apparent to the reader of this poem in English, though, is that this language is also borrowed from heroic epic, at least in part.  When thin fire runs under Sappho’s skin, the verb there (hupedramon) is regularly used in the Iliad when a hero runs up, grabs the knees of the man who’s trying to kill him, and begs for supplication. The image of sweat pouring down one’s body occurs in battle scenes when armored heroes are in moments of particular distress. Similarly, the idea of trembling “seizing” a person is something that happens on the battlefield, often to groups of warriors who are looking for a way to avoid death. When a hero does fall to the earth in death, that moment is signified by a dark mist covering his eyes.  Elsewhere Sappho contrasts her poetry more explicitly to epic; here she borrows the symptoms of epic battlefield distress to describe her personal, sensual response to seeing the object of her desire. 

And that takes me to the last remarkable aspect of this poem. Who is “you”? (Is it you, the reader?)  Does “you” even know that Sappho exists?  There is no indication that Sappho and the woman who has completely vanquished her have ever spoken, ever even locked eyes. The poem as we have it leaves open the question of whether this is purely the personal experience of the author, whose love affair with “you” exists only in her own psyche, or if Sappho and “you” have had some interaction, but remain divided by an uncrossed gulf of unrequited desire. As external readers, we’re also invited to imagine how “you” would respond, if she were to read the poem that is addressed directly to her. Would she, also, experience this litany of bodily sensations? As you read the poem, do you? 

The poem ends a fragment, and the last words are problematic.  The phrase “even poor” is, in Greek, not in the correct meter, and something else must have been written here.  But several of Sappho’s poems seem to end with a brief turn at the end, and I’m inclined to think that something like this line introduced a final stanza.  In any case, there is something fitting about the poem as we have it: in a poem about unrealized, unrequited, unacknowledged desire, in which the poet declares herself unable to speak, her tongue broken, we are left with a line that trails off into illegibility. The fragmentary ending, though certainly not what Sappho wrote, captures the open vulnerability of the speaker’s desire.