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Dromo's Den
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[Up] [Dromo's Den] Sappho Biography SAPPHO, A Lesbian poetess of good family, a contemporary of Alcćus (c.600 B.C.) and with him the chief creator of the Ćolian personal lyric. Sappho is for us chiefly a name, a theme for the fervent rhetoric evoked by impassioned contemplation of of the few exquisite fragments of her poems that time has spared, a type of the highest achievement of woman in literature, a symbol and synonym of the intoxication of absolute lyric, "all fire and dew." She was born at Eresos, or, more probably, at Mitylene, where she lived until she was exiled by an uprising of the democratic party against the oligarchs. From her poems we infer that she practiced and taught her art in a coterie, club, or school of maidens, to whom she was devotedly attached, whom she addressed in the language of passionate adoration, and whose bridal odes she composed when they left her to marry. Familiar to all poets and lovers is the legend (unsupported) of her unrequited love for Phaon and of her casting herself down from the promontory known as Lover's Leap, or Sappho's Leap (q.v.), to that "Leucadian grave which hides too deep the supreme head of song" (Swinburne). Alcćus is said to have been her lover and to have addressed her in the words "Violet-tressed, sweetly smiling, pure Sappho, fain would I speak, but shame forbids." To this the poetess replied, "If thy desire was of aught fair and good, shame had not beset thine eyes, but thou hadst spoken thereof frank and true." The ancients read her poems in nine books. The extant fragments include (1) the ode to Aphrodite, 27 lines in Sapphic strophes quoted by the critic Dionysius of Halicarnassus as an example of the "smooth style"; (2) the "Blest as the immortal gods is he," to name it by Ambrose Philips's hopelessly inadequate translation, four Sapphic strophes cited by Longinus as a specimen of the sublime; and (3) some hundred or more single lines and stanzas in a great variety of lyric metres. They may be found in Bergk's Poetć Lyrici, vol. iii (new ed., Leipzig, 1914), in the Teubner Anthologia Lyrica, and, with English translations added, in Wharton's Sappho (3d ed., Chicago, 1895). Some additional fragments have recently been recovered from Egyptian papyri; for these consult J. M. Edmonds, in. the Classical Review, xxii (London, 1909) , xxviii, 73 ff. (1914), and in the Classical Quarterly, iii (ib., 1909), and A. S. Hunt in "The Year's Work" in Classical Studies, vol. ix, p. 39 (London, 1915). The chief motives of Sappho's poems are love and the beauty of nature. They contain no profound thoughts and few striking images, but are marked by exquisite beauty of diction and liquid lapse of rhythm. Swinburne, in his poem "On the Cliff's," has in the following manner reproduced the impression of one wistful waif of verse: I loved thee,--hark, one tenderer note than all-- Atthis, of old time, once--one low, long fall, Sighing--one long, low, lovely, loveless call, Dying--one pause in song so flamelike fast— Atthis, long since in old time overpast— One soft first pause and last. One,--then the old rage of rapture's fieriest rain Storms all the music-maddened night again. The New International Encyclopaedia, Vol. XX (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1920) 462-463. |