Precious Agony: Sappho on Love

Patrick O’Brien

The radicalism and brilliance of Sappho’s poetry lie in her intense focus on love and her own individuality. At a time when poets primarily sang about glorious military and athletic exploits, Sappho devoted her attention to the bewildering complexity of her feelings toward others; while Sappho’s culture valued collective over individual experience, she unabashedly wrote in the first person, putting her soul to verse for the world to examine. In her poetry, Sappho’s intricate attitude toward love contains seemingly contradictory descriptions. Love is agony from which one longs to be released, but it is also a sublime elixir, both a gift given and a snare set by the gods. Personified by Aphrodite, love is an otherworldly force of its own right. It is beauty and it is war. To convey these attitudes, Sappho uses militaristic and divine imagery. She carefully brings elements of her culture into the conversations of her poems, and she assumes a persona that is so powerfully and vividly individual both in its self-revelations and in its relations with other humans and forces that it must represent her own selfhood.

Sappho believes that love can cause terrible pain and suffering, scarring the self and the soul. In Fragment I, the first verb that she uses is “beg”—she pleads with Aphrodite not to “subdue” her heart “with sorrows and with pains,” a phrase that likely alludes to the feelings that result from unrequited love (51). Sappho feels vulnerable to love; love is an “agony” from which she longs to be “released” (52). To Sappho, the suffering that love causes is not merely in the mind. In Fragment XXXI, the sight of her beloved enjoying the company of a man stimulates a visceral physical reaction in her, to which she devotes several stanzas. The sight “sets” her heart “to pounding” in her breast (55). Suddenly, she can “no longer speak;” a “subtle fire runs stealthily” beneath her skin, and she is blind and her “ears ring and buzz” (56).

Love overwhelms her senses, preventing her from perceiving her beloved with the ease of the male suitor, who remains mysteriously immune, like a god. Beneath this description of the physical torment that love inspires runs an undercurrent of ecstatic pleasure. By not experiencing the emotions and physical sensations that Sappho does, the male suitor, the would-be divinity, cannot participate in what is before him with the same fullness as Sappho is able to do. Implicitly, Sappho questions his very capacity to love. Although love seems to harm Sappho, causing her sweat to “pour down,” her flesh to “tremble” and burn, so that she feels “not far from dying,” these same feelings elevate her above the male suitor, who experiences the world in a limited, superficial manner (56). If the male suitor is a god, as Sappho imagines, then he never can feel the richness of the moment that mortals can. Moreover, the anguish that Sappho experiences as a mortal is somehow sustainable; although the ending of Fragment XXXI has been lost, the last line that has survived is “everything can be endured because…” (56). Thus Sappho, through some interior or exterior power, can participate repeatedly in the Dionysian throes of love and live to tell the tale. In the same way that a painful seizure can bring great pleasure, Sappho suggests, the suffering that love inflicts is connected to the rapture that it bestows.

Sappho believes that love causes agony by forcing one to feel or do things against one’s will. In Fragment I, first Sappho begs Aphrodite to spare her heart the pain of love. Sappho clearly is conscious of Aphrodite’s potency, the way that the goddess can overcome one desire with another. Then, strangely, Aphrodite attends to Sappho. She smiles at Sappho and asks her several times what she wants “this time,” as if she is accustomed to doing Sappho’s bidding (52). Telling Sappho that she will turn those who “wrong” her into friends and those who resist her love into devotees “even against [their] will,” Aphrodite seems to be Sappho’s servant, though the goddess apparently has not yet released her from “this agony” (52). In this poem, Sappho sees love as an independent force, one that she seems able to control occasionally— or, at least, to believe that she can control—and one that sometimes overcomes her, leading her through torment and ecstasy. In addition, she envisages love as a power that she wields, albeit it remains external to her; it is not Sappho who, through her own beauty and wit, seduces the women that she desires or transforms her enemies into friends. Rather, it is Aphrodite who from heaven in her magnificent chariot, by turns an obsequious and vicious goddess, causes love to shift in Sappho’s favor and against it. In the poem Sappho becomes at once humble and triumphant, a slave to and master of love.

Sappho believes that the beauty of love is more important than life. In Fragment XVI, she defies her militaristic culture by contending that love’s beauty transcends that of horsemen, foot soldiers, and ships (54). Sappho would rather see the simplicity of the “lovely step” and “glancing brightness” of her beloved’s face than the grandeur of Lydian chariots, even of men prepared for battle and arrayed in armor (54). In this radical statement, Sappho places individual above collective experience; in beauty, the physical grace of a single woman dwarfs the might of an entire civilization mobilized for war. In this fragment, I am conscious of the separation between my experience and that of Sappho. So far in my life, war and the military have remained abstractions. I have not had to fear the threat of invaders or to bury a loved one who perished in combat. In ancient Greece, however, violence and instability were facts of life, and the beauty that Sappho sees in the military is the beauty that the vulnerable sees in the protector. In a sense, Sappho’s elevation of the beauty of the individual beloved in this poem is like valuing love above one’s safety, a claim that remains radical even in modern western culture.

Sappho consistently uses militaristic language, imagery, and metaphor to convey her thoughts and emotions on love. In Fragment I, Aphrodite rides in a chariot, and Sappho concludes the poem by calling on the goddess to be her “ally in arms” (52). The poet’s artistic reliance on the military does not occur merely because of the centrality of the military in the culture in which she lived. It also results from her notion that love has conflicting, war-like manifestations. To Sappho, love entails a battle between desires within oneself, as well as between oneself and one’s beloved. In the interior battle, one must attempt to overcome love if it remains unrequited or gives cause for jealousy or loneliness, and to try to direct it toward that which can provide real and lasting satisfaction. In the exterior battle, one implores the gods— and does whatever one can—to cause one’s beloved to return his or her affections. Illustrating Sappho’s attitude, Fragment I includes the tension of Sappho’s desperate wish for Aphrodite to free her from love, and the tension of her commanding the goddess to make her beloved love her (52). Sappho’s use of the military in her poetry is testament to the subtle sophistication of her imagination, which conceived of the nuanced strategy of intertwining militaristic rhetoric and imagery with her message of the similarities between love and war.

Besides using the military as metaphor, Sappho conveys her attitude toward love by alluding to cultural and artistic conversations and themes in her work. Her use of Greek religion is the most frequent and explicit invocation of her culture in her poetry. She wrote Fragment I in the style of poems of religious devotion (52). Furthermore, Fragment XXXI contains several references to divinity (55). Sappho’s use of religion provides a spiritual backdrop for her poems’ subjects and themes; by employing religious rhetoric and imagery in her careful ruminations on love, she seems to suggest the religiosity of love, the idea that the devotion that one feels toward his or her beloved can equal or rival one’s devotion to the gods. In her poems, Sappho also draws from the work of other poets. In Fragment XVI, she refers to Homer when she presents Helen’s actions as evidence for her contention that “whatever one loves” is the most beautiful thing in the world (54). She argues that because the beautiful Helen abandoned her noble husband and family out of love, love is a powerful subjective force that can overpower social customs and norms, as well as one’s personal loyalties and attachments to others. By not mentioning that Aphrodite overrode Helen in making her fall in love with Paris, Sappho thematically connects Fragment XVI to Fragment I; both poems depict love’s capability to make one act in a way that is utterly contrary to one’s wishes. Sappho’s use of religion and the work of other poets deepens her poetry and enables her to weave the themes that she creates into the immortal fabric of her culture.

As a poet Sappho tackles the complexity of love with a level of depth that has placed her among the greatest poets in the world. Her accomplishments are more laudable when they are considered in their proper cultural context. She wrote about love in a civilization in which it was considered trivial compared with collective militarism and athleticism. Thus her art expanded what was considered to be appropriate material for poetry and, at the same time, pioneered the literary exploration of the self and its most intimate emotions and struggles. Through her use of militaristic metaphor and language, and through her inclusion of cultural and religious material, Sappho challenges her readers to reconcile the seeming contradictions in the nature of love and its expression. She compels us to see the absolute beauty of love and the way in which it inspires by turns unending agony and actualized joy. She outlines the tension between controlling love and being controlled by it. She shows that, although love is a powerful external force, a tool of a whimsical god, being susceptible to it is a kind of power. Even the torment of unrequited love enables the sufferer to perceive and experience the world in a unique way, one that is as endurable as it is precious.

References

Sappho. Greek Lyric. Translated by Andrew Miller. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996.

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