Sappho

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
I seem to me

1. How does Sappho’s presentation of love differ from Homer’s? Compare the loving discourse between Odysseus and Penelope to that which Sappho writes. Are these differences significant? If so, how?
   
   For Homer, love has a specific narrative function and serves the themes of the work they take place in. So in the Iliad, the interactions between Hector and Andromache epitomize the tension between husbands who need to give their life to protect their state, and their wives who rely on their husbands for their livelihood. Both feel conflicting emotions: duty against fear, the personal against the communal, and the union of marriage ironically severed by the need to protect it. Lastly, and most importantly, H & A are parents, and Astyanax's reaction to his father's armor reflects these tensions above, just as the babe's death is a proxy for Troy's destruction.
   
   Odysseus and Penelope likewise embody themes from the Odyssey. Their reuniting, taking place at the climax of the epic, putting marriage and its symbol (the deeply rooted marriage bed) as the apex of civilization, are book-ended with scenes where the couple first tests each other's faithfulness and then give each other counsel. They are halves to the same whole, and when combined bring order to the universe.
   
   While Sappho has themes too, these are reflections of love as they're really experienced, and appear less constructed and more natural than the scenes Homer paints us. Love doesn't serve some larger point but is an end onto itself, fueled by passion and controlling the "story" more than the other way around. She has poems where love is unrequited and brings a flood of emotions whose only purpose is to bring attention to themselves: desire, lust, sadness, regret, elation, with each of these reflected physically instead of just held internally. This isn't the careful script of Homer, but a description by Sappho as to what's actually lived-through. Or so it seems.
   
   
2. Choose three poetic tropes that Sappho makes use of and analyze their occurrences. What tropes are most common in her poetry? How does she employ them? What tropes are strikingly absent from her work?
   
   Setting aside the use of metaphors and symbols--which are ubiquitous in literature--the three tropes Sappho employs most often are hyperbole, invoking the gods, and rhetorical questions. None of these are particularly unique in ancient literature, and hyperbole is a pleasant mainstay in love poetry to this day. However I'm not that interested in how she wields them, and don't see much to write about. The only trope worth celebrating--now tame by today's standards--is her focus on homosexual love, about which I don't have anything new to say.
   
   Instead I'm fascinated by what tropes are missing. Almost entirely absent from Sappho's poems are other love cliches: star-crossed lovers, fabricated conflicts, and consummated desires. No where do we see two darlings pine for each other but unable to meet for whatever reason. Nor do we see them overcome that whatever reason and revel in each other's blaze. Instead we see a relationship after it's ended, a woman jealous of her friend (or her friend's partner), an old woman lamenting her age, an invocation to Aphrodite to engineer rape (!), and other atypical romantic states with the same beauty and intensity that's normally reserved for more conventional scenes. The closest we get to the typical are Sappho's marriage songs which, while lovely, feel a little too commercial.
   


3. What is Sappho’s essential understanding of love as revealed in these works? To what degree is it a passion, and to what degree is it an intellectual state? Is love good or bad? What other passions are most commonly associated with love?
   
   The heavy shadow draping over these poems is the tyranny of love.  Its ability to grant euphoria or anguish, against one's will, with no indication of length or outcome, tortures Sappho as a curse worth having. In fact there's an almost perverse reliance on Aphrodite that superbly reveals the god's power, so often tossed aside in other Greek myths. Perhaps then these poems are an attempt by Sappho to control that power, which so clearly controls her. Viewed in that light these are less poems than spells, meant to heal a broken heart or quench a clawing thirst.
   
   The associated passions that flow from this are also threatening: longing, hope, sadness, jealousy, and--most dangerous--bliss. Thus love cannot be identified as good or bad, but an endlessly mixed bag of emotions and desires roiling inside Sappho, with all the intensity and adventure of a Greek epic.
   
   
4. What is Sappho’s conception of the gods? Are they active or passive? Are they good or bad? How does this conception of the gods compare to Homer, Gilgamesh, and the ancient Egyptians? Is there a central, unifying understanding?
   
   Sappho articulates two conceptions. The first is perfunctory; in service of the marriage songs that she crafts for others. These are conventional and largely passive. The second is a more personal and active conception. She fittingly invokes female gods (Hera, Artemis, but by far Aphrodite) to protect and guide her and her loved ones.
   
   What's salient is her treatment of Aphrodite. Building on my prior answer, there is a dimension to the goddess of love that's reassuring. She unites people, she grants lustful desires, and when weighing the value of passion it's clear that a life without Aphrodite is not worth living. But by the same token, the unbridled influence that love can have over a person, not merely on their actions but on their psyche, casts this goddess as a tormentor at worst and a gatekeeper to happiness at best. She's even painted as capricious ("spangled mind"), which is no way to handle the most important part of a person's life.
   
   This is really what separates Sappho's religious views from her contemporaries. In other mythologies gods indeed control the world in capricious ways, but these always dealt with the exterior. Property, nations, flesh. It's only Aphrodite who can make or break someone's interior life, and for those who have been oppressively reduced to only their interior, this gives her life-or-death importance. In this way Sappho's appeal to this goddess is tragically sadomasochistic. She both loves and hates a symbol of her chains as well as her freedom. (From here it's impossible not to extend the analysis to her role in society at large, and what kind of pregnant symbolism homosexuality provides.) But to the extent she was leashed in love as well as life, Sappho seems to have at least found freedom in her art.