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Here Was One
No. 21
Grant Hodges
December 05, 2023
Fragment 31
Dear Reader,
Sappho (c. 630-570 BCE) was the greatest lyric poet of antiquity. Known as the Tenth Muse and the Poetess, only 650 lines of her poetry survive today, the vast majority of which consist of fragments from longer works.
Little is known about Sappho’s personal life. According to Greek mythology, she killed herself by leaping from the Leucadian cliffs due to her unrequired love for a Lesbos ferryman named Phaon. Today, Sappho is often seen as a symbol of love and desire between women (hence the terms, “sapphic” and “lesbian”). Regardless, ancient sources seem to confirm that she largely wrote love poetry, which earned deep admiration from later scholars, particularly in the Hellenistic Era.
Background
Fragment 31 is Sappho’s most famous, and one of the most substantial, fragments that remains of her poetry. It consists of four complete “Sapphic” stanzas of four lines, which were preserved in a First Century CE treatise, On the Sublime. (The original poem was longer, likely between five and eight stanzas.)
The fragment describes a speaker’s response to seeing a man with a woman the speaker loves.
“Fragment 31”
By Sappho (trans. Anne Carson)
He seems to me equal to the gods that man
whoever he is who opposite you
sits and listens close
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing — oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking
is left in me
no: tongue breaks and thin
fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
fills ears
and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead — or almost
I seem to me.
What It Offers
Maria Popova has called Sappho “the poet laureate of heartbreak.” Others have written about the “jealousy” in her poetry, particularly with respect to the man in the poem above.
I read Fragment 31 differently—not about heartbreak or jealousy, but about the manifestation of the speaker’s longing. The Romantic poets, Byron and Tennyson, were both infatuated by the intensity and accuracy of the feelings described in the poem, and both tried their hand at translating it. The fragment was included in On the Sublime for the same reason—as an example of the physical depiction of the speaker’s inner state, which embodies the sublime. As the translator, Anne Carson, puts it:
Jealousy is beside the point; the normal world of erotic responses is beside the point; praise is beside the point. It is a poem about the lover’s mind in the act of constructing desire for itself. Sappho’s subject is eros as it appears to her; she makes no claim beyond that. A single consciousness represents itself; one mental state is exposed to view.
Of course, the reason why Sappho endures is because of the skill with which she represents the speaker’s mental state. Even today, the figurative fluttering heart, the overwhelming attraction that renders a person speechless, the cold sweats are all still common ways we describe eros. As with “A Poem of Changgan” (the subject of the ninth newsletter), which was written by Li Bai a millennium later, Sappho’s language remains supremely affecting because of its integrity to a human emotion that hasn’t changed in the ~2,500 years since her death.
*****
What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one.