Immortal Words: Sappho On Love, Life, And Death
Much has been claimed while little is known about Sappho, but this should surprise no one. It would be remarkable for a substantial biography of anyone to survive from the seventh century B.C.E. Still she ranks among the small cohort of people who linger in the form of phrases on tongues that are oblivious to their origin. Sapphic is obviously an eponymous adjective in semi-regular employment, but as is the more common lesbian, derived from the island of Lesbos, from which this ancient Greek comes. From this island, and over two and a half thousand years, Sappho’s poetry has stumbled down to us largely in the form of incomplete fragments found in expected and unexpected places alike. (For example, some of her poetry was discovered on pieces of papyrus co-opted for use in a type of ancient plaster.)
Mary Barnard, the translator of my copy of Sappho’s poetry, explains that surviving sources are at best problematic for those hoping for complete works. Further frustration awaits the purist who desires entirely accurate writings unadulterated by the errors resulting from millennia of successive hand-copying of poetry that was initially oral. Barnard explains,
The sources for our texts are various, and most of them are as unsatisfactory as might be expected in the case of a poet who lived twenty-five centuries ago. Sappho may or may not have written her poems down. She sang or recited them with lyre accompaniment; they were passed on to professional singers who sang them wherever Greek was spoken. Copies were made and these copies were copied. The earliest papyrus text we possess dates from the third century B.C., about three hundred years after her death.
Scholars have made due with what they have and even translated into modern English her poetry retains insight and honesty that has proven human enough to be discussed millenniums later. She may be called prescient or slightly pompous, but she was correct when she said “Although they are/Only breath, words/which I command/are immortal.”
Per usual in poetry, Love is featured prominently. With endless songs and poems dedicated to Love, mustering originality to sprinkle on one’s own musings often feels impossible. Yet there is never a lack of trying. It is a universal and intensely driving emotion that will always lend itself to new attempts at expression. In a moment of love’s captivation Sappho seems to recognize this, saying
Now I know why Eros
Of all the progeny of
Earth and Heaven, has
Been most dearly loved
Though love may come slow, Sappho knew it could be sudden too.
Without warning
As a whirlwind
Swoops on an oak
Love shakes my heart
Once we have felt love we want more, and we want it now. A yearning heart makes the mind distracted, and everyday tasks become insufferable.
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.
The love-induced longing carries an anticipatory pleasure of its own, and most know this in moments of reflection. Never to feel that longing would mean you never loved, and the intensity of the craving reflects the intensity of the love.
Thank you, my dear
You came, and you did
Well to come: I needed
You. You have made
Love blaze up in my breast- bless you!
Bless you as often
As the hours have
Been endless to me
While you were gone
It is all too usual for us to ask ourselves whether or not we are worthy of love in general, but when we find someone who fits neatly upon the pedestal we’ve been so skeptical someone could ever climb high enough to occupy, we may wonder if we are worthy of their personal love. What, we wonder, could we possibly offer them? Sappho again puts feeling into terse words:
I asked myself
What, Sappho, can you give one who
Has everything
Like Aphrodite?
Her answer to this may be metaphor for worshiping her love like a goddess, or a literal declaration of her intent to call upon Aphrodite for help. If I were a religious man, I would understand the latter as well as I do the former. She responds:
And I said
I shall burn the
Fat thigh-bones of
A white she-goat
On her altar
Love is not all happiness of course. What about when it leaves and we don’t want it too? She may have been more graceful than others in this, since ex-lovers often harbor resentment toward each other. Whatever the reason, one lover may leave, perhaps having fallen out of love, or reluctantly needing to end the relationship. One decides to leave while the other stays to suffer without choice. Here Sappho, left to suffer, responds to it with raw honesty but also grace:
I have not heard one word from her
Frankly I Wish I were dead.
When she left, she wept
A great deal; she said to
Me, “This parting must be endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly.”
I said, “Go, and be happy
But remember (you know
Well) whom you leave shackled by love.
“If you forget me, think
Of our gifts to Aphrodite
And all the loveliness that we shared…”
In one poem Sappho reviles the exploitation of love for base manipulation. This judgment is indicated by the word “venom” and the phrase “strikes me down”.
With his venom
Irresistible
And bittersweet
That loosener
Of limbs, Love
Reptile-like
Strikes me down
What about the low points to which a dying love can drive us as we try to hold onto what is no longer there? Can we accept reality and begin to move on? In two poems she expresses the former and answers the latter:
1) Afraid of losing you
I ran fluttering
Like a little girl
After her mother
2) I said, Sappho
Enough! Why
Try to move
A hard heart?
Her poetry does not only center on the women and men she loved. She talks of enjoying life by singing purely for the enjoyment of her friends; an expression of enjoying life for enjoyment’s sake and to not give too much bother to the judgments of less happy observers.
We shall enjoy it
As for him who finds
Fault, may silliness
And sorrow take him!
She also includes a warning on the dangers of wealth, which is often the same as power.
Wealth unchaperoned
By virtue is never
An innocuous neighbor
On death she holds a more pessimistic view than wealth, which can at least be made innocuous, if not beneficial, by virtue. “Death is evil” she said, and as evidence claims that if death were good then the gods too would die, which, like her excoriation of empty wealth, can be read as a criticism of the privileged who assure the unprivileged that their suffering is good, even noble and necessary. (This may come in the form of a wealthy elite or the smiling face of Mother Teresa.) She approaches her own mortality with some calm, at least at the time she authored the poem featured on the book’s last page.
I have no complaint
Prosperity that
The golden Muses
Gave me was no
Delusion: dead, I
Won’t be forgotten.
The promise that death is not the end of life has quieted (and for some fortunate fellows even silenced) anxieties around death. Sappho however found comfort in knowing she would live on symbolically through the legacy of poetry. It is comforting to know that you will be remembered when you are gone, and that is the most anyone can ask for regarding life after death.
Remembered or not, we have lives to live and the opening line of Sappho’s above-quoted poem, reduced today to the sarcastic quip “no regrets,” should be taken seriously. During a class discussion on this poem a former professor of mine left us with brief advice. Instantly colliding the present with our hopefully distant end, he implored, “Keep your last page in mind. You’re going to have to write one, and you want it to start with ‘I have no complaint.’”
