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Sappho’s lyrics are the subject of various debates concerning the spiritual perception of love by the ancient Greeks. Sappho’s poetry can be called a treasury of feelings and experiences. The main theme revealed in this poetess’s poems is love. Feelings in her lyrics take on their own unique image. The poetess really showed the world a new hypostasis of human existence – that boundless and mysterious microcosm of love, which alone gives human existence singularity and uniqueness.
The semantic load of the poems of the poetess gives an opportunity to take a closer look at the woman’s attitude to love. Sappho expresses love as a passionate feeling, which deprives speechlessness, which penetrates the body from head to toe and makes a woman powerless. Love in Sappho’s poems has exceptional emotional power. It is necessary to analyze one of Sappho’s poems in order to understand the relationship between love and the poetic language used by the writer.
Sappho wrote wedding songs, hymns and other melodic poems. The collection of her surviving poems consists of more than 200 fragments, only a small part of which contains complete texts. Initially, the corpus of her works, according to antique sources, consisted of seven books, most of which in their form related to monodic (solo) lyric poetry written in complex poetic measures, the unit of which was not a line but a stanza. Sappho’s muse is full of strong, sometimes agonizing passion; she calls for love, graceful beauty, for the sun. Sappho puts her poems in a variety of complex metrical forms.
Analyzing one of the poems by the poet, it is worth paying attention to the way Sappho uses language to express her feelings of love. An important observation here is that especially vivid and important feelings for the author are brought out separately in each stanza (Wisner 2021). In other words, the first three lines of each stanza are aimed at description and characterization, while the fourth is the concluding, associative one for the lyrical heroine. At the very end of the piece, the main idea is brought out strictly in a separate line, summing up all the reflections and uncontrolled feelings. Thus, it is in the last sentence and the fourth line of each stanza that the main message lies (Wisner 2021).
In the fragment, it can be seen how the author extols the object of her love experience. Sappho depicts the feelings a woman experiences when she is near the person she loves. She deifies those people who, being near her lover, can behave calmly. In this, the contrast between the people who are indifferent to love and her can be seen, the woman who is passionately in love. Then there is the mind-boggling flow of emotions and feelings associated with being close to the person she loves. Sappho describes the emotional outburst that occurs when she is near the object of her love experience.
A further observation important to the characterization of the writer’s language is the absence of capital letters. Although this is an English translation, the presence of lower case letters is vital here (Wisner 2021). The point is that this technique contributes to the perception of the text as a whole, something that should be read in the same breath and felt as one (Wisner 2021). Punctuation and capitalization would interfere with that perception, so ignoring them is not a sign of illiteracy but a literary move.
In the end, it turns out that language and love correlate as follows. Thanks to the modification of written language and the uncharacteristic arrangement of stanzas in classical poetry, love feels and looks as discontinuous and uncontrollable as the text itself. On the one hand, it is momentary and, unified, universal, as evidenced by the absence of capital letters and dots (Wisner 2021). On the other hand, it comes in waves and is interrupted, as can be seen in the stanzas, where three lines are long and the fourth is short, which seems to cut off everything that is said.
At the same time, the traditional motifs of folklore and maiden song rituals are infused in her work with keenly perceived personal feelings. The structure of the poem corresponds to the rules of ancient Greek hymns, the essence of which is a native reference to a certain character of the modern world for Sappho, for example, the goddess; its content is a complaint about unrequited feelings and a purely folkloric antithesis of dissension.
In the ancient Greek epic as a genre, love is usually expressed as a physical attraction, eroticism, but Sappho has a different position. The point is that the poetess characterizes this feeling as a rush of power, with which man is not able to cope, in other words, as the element. The poem does not express a drop of voluptuousness so often attributed to Sappho. The admiration in love is expressed in simple participle clauses indicating the deification of a loved one.
The main advantage and innovation of Sappho should be identified as the description of the inner state of the person. For example, the poetess uses the metaphorical phrase “fire under the skin” when describing feelings (Wisner 2021). Before Sappho, love was expressed solely by outward signs and was often characterized as sexual attraction. The observation and understanding of all that the poetess speaks of are available only to someone who has experienced similar feelings. Accordingly, the poetess puts a part of herself and her nature into each poem.
Epiphany serves as the main engine and vector of Sappho’s work since almost all of her works have common features with wedding songs. Unfortunately, only insignificant fragments of them have survived, but it is still seen how closely these works by Sappho came into contact with folklore. Here is a comparison of a bridegroom with a slender branch and a bride – with a ruddy apple; it hangs high on a tree and is given into hands only to the one who can reach it.
Therefore, Sappho’s love is “dressed” in a beautiful dress and surrounded by the scent of flowers and the breath of spring. In describing her heroines and heroes, the poetess is not stingy with comparisons of folklore types. The poem is full of epithets, which gives it imagery (Wisner 2021). Sappho’s style is characterized by metaphor and inversion. Lexical repetition allows the lyrical hero to express his subjective and expressive attitude to what is happening. In addition, this repetition is simultaneously the antithesis of both semantic and syntactic.
Like all ancient Greek poets, Sappho makes active use of periphrases, allegory and symbolism. Rhetorical exclamations and rhetorical questions are characteristic of this poem and the genre as a whole. It is important to emphasize that the exclamation here is specific, expressed through a surge of feeling and emotion, where it would be logical to put an exclamation or question mark in the classical manner (Wisner 2021). The poem is written in hexameter and has no rhyme. The poem’s coherence is given by its clear rhythmic organization. Every fourth line is shortened and consists of three stressed and two unstressed syllables. This gives the verse a special sound and “sews” all the verses together. There are four four-line stanzas, divided up rhythmically rather than syntactically or semantically.
The evaluation of Sappho in later times of the ancient world was contradictory. On the one hand, she was called the tenth muse and admired for the rhythmic richness of her poems; on the other hand, the Attic comedy was extremely popular and was a genre that society trusted. In the Golodoran states, women had more opportunities and rights than in Athens, which was the main reason for this phenomenon. In other words, the vestiges of gendered commonwealths remained relevant to society.
Sappho’s lyrics are a vivid depiction of the multifaceted nature of love. There are trembling feelings, passion, and longing for the loved one. In all its splendor, the deep inner world of this woman is revealed to us. Lyrics by Sappho – confirmation of the versatility of the spiritual world of ancient Greek women and its uniqueness. Love for the women of Hellas is a reflection of feelings overwhelming the mind and body. Whoever the lines of Sappho’s poems were addressed to – they are a confirmation of attachment to the loved one. Most of the poems depict rejected, unsatisfied love, which may have been due to the unequal status of men and women in ancient Greece. At the same time, in Sappho’s work, love takes on immeasurable power, fills the whole body and mind, and is a reflection of her spiritual world.
Work Cited
Wisner, Geoff. (2021). Fragments of Sappho. Web.
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