Desire Itself, Rendered in a Handful of Words — Fragments of Sappho

Title: Fragments of Sappho Author: Sappho Creation Date: c. 610-570 BCE Location: Greece (Lesbos)

Summary

Sappho's surviving work consists of one nearly complete poem (the Hymn to Aphrodite), several substantial fragments, and hundreds of smaller pieces — some just a single word or phrase. What remains is enough to make her one of the greatest poets who ever lived. Her subject is desire — its onset, its intensity, its aftermath. In Fragment 31, she describes watching a woman she loves talking with a man: her tongue breaks, fire runs under her skin, her ears roar, sweat pours down her body, she turns greener than grass and feels herself close to death. Few poets before or since have rendered the physical experience of desire with such precision and ferocity.

Sappho also wrote epithalamia (wedding songs), hymns to the gods, and poems of memory and loss. Her world is intensely intimate — small gatherings of women, garlands of flowers, the scent of myrrh, moonlight on the sea. She wrote on Lesbos, for a community of women whose bonds were emotional, intellectual, and erotic. The fragments, fractured by time, have an accidental beauty of their own — lines breaking off into silence, words surrounded by whiteness, meaning hovering at the edge of what can be known.

Why This Book Matters

Sappho stands near the foundation of lyric poetry as personal expression — a first-person singular voice speaking from the depths of individual experience. Greek poetry before her was not only about gods and heroes, but in Sappho's hands poetry could become unmistakably intimate: your desire, your loss, your specific, unrepeatable experience of being alive. This is one of the most consequential shifts in the history of literature. The ancient world called her the Tenth Muse. She is also the earliest major female voice to survive in Western literature and one of its earliest surviving literary voices of desire between women. Her survival, even in fragments, is a civilisational inheritance of immense value.

Historical Context

Sappho lived on Lesbos in the early 6th century BCE, during the Archaic period of Greek civilisation — a time of aristocratic culture, emerging city-states, colonisation, and the first flowering of personal lyric poetry (alongside contemporaries Alcaeus and Anacreon). Lesbos was a wealthy island with a tradition of musical culture. Sappho appears to have led or been part of a community of women devoted to poetry, music, and the worship of Aphrodite. She was exiled at least once for political reasons. The bulk of her work — nine books in antiquity — was lost through the long attrition of manuscript transmission and changing educational priorities.

Literary Significance

Sappho's formal innovations are foundational. She perfected the Sapphic stanza (named after her), wrote with a directness and economy that make most later love poetry seem ornate, and brought the speaking self — the "I" of personal experience — to the centre of literary art. Her influence runs through Catullus (who translated Fragment 31 into Latin), Horace, the troubadours, Petrarch, and into every modern lyric tradition. Anne Carson's translation brilliantly preserves the fragments as fragments, using brackets and white space to honour what has been lost, turning the gaps themselves into a commentary on desire and absence.

Research Notes

Included as the essential voice of Greek lyric poetry and as the earliest major female author in the Western canon. Anne Carson's If Not, Winter is the most influential modern translation — a work of art in its own right. Willis Barnstone's The Complete Poems of Sappho (2009) is a readable alternative that fills in more gaps. New fragments continue to be discovered (notably in 2014, from papyrus mummy wrappings), so our knowledge of Sappho is still growing. The question of how to read fragmentary texts is itself a rich scholarly conversation that Carson's edition foregrounds.

The Reading

Begin in the Alexandrian library, with the nine scrolls.

Imagine the catalogue: Sappho of Lesbos, nine books, Aeolian Greek, late seventh and early sixth century before the common era. Imagine the librarians reaching for them. Then imagine the fires, the damp, the priests who would not copy a woman who sang to women, the centuries of indifference, the field mice in the basements, the mummy-wrappers in Egypt who tore the rolls into strips to bind the dead. Out of the nine books, one whole song reaches us. After that: a few long pieces. After that: scraps. After that: a single line. After that: a single word inside two square brackets, the brackets marking where the papyrus tore.

What is left is read here on the page exactly as it survives — the white space kept, the brackets kept, the names of the girls and the goddesses landing where they land.

Hymn to Aphrodite (Fragment 1)

The one song that came down whole. A prayer to Aphrodite, goddess of love, addressed by name in the first line and answered by name in the middle. It is not the first time the two of them have spoken.

Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind, child of Zeus, who twists lures, I beg you do not break with hard pains, O lady, my heart

but come here if ever before you caught my voice far off and listening left your father's golden house and came,

yoking your car. And fine birds brought you, quick sparrows over the black earth whipping their wings down the sky through midair —

they arrived. But you, O blessed one, smiled in your deathless face and asked what (now again) I have suffered and why (now again) I am calling out

and what I want to happen most of all in my crazy heart. Whom should I persuade (now again) to lead you back into her love? Who, O Sappho, is wronging you?

For if she flees, soon she will pursue. If she refuses gifts, rather will she give them. If she does not love, soon she will love even unwilling.

Come to me now: loose me from hard care and all my heart longs to accomplish, accomplish. You be my ally.

Notice what the goddess does. She smiles. She asks, with the gentle exasperation of a friend who has been called too many times for the same trouble, now again? — now again? — and gets the name of the wronged poet onto her tongue. Who, O / Sappho, is wronging you? The pronouns are exact. The one who flees is she. The one who refuses gifts is she. The one who does not love is she — and Aphrodite, divine bookkeeper of these matters, promises the reversal. Pursuit. Gifts. Love, even unwilling. Then the request lands, twice: accomplish, accomplish. Be my ally.

Fragment 16: what you love

Some say an army of horsemen, some say an army on foot, and some say a fleet of ships is the most beautiful thing on the black earth. But I say it is whatever you love.

Five lines, and the world the men keep arguing about — cavalry, infantry, navy, the catalogue of force — is set aside. In its place: one private rule. The most beautiful thing is whatever you love. The poem then reaches for proof from the oldest story the Greeks know.

Easy to make this understood by all, for she who far surpassed all mortals in beauty, Helen, left the best of all husbands behind and went sailing to Troy, not caring at all for her child or her dear parents, but [Aphrodite] led her astray...

...which reminds me now of Anaktoria who is gone.

I would rather see her lovely step and the motion of light on her face than chariots of Lydians or ranks of foot soldiers in arms.

The most beautiful woman in the world is summoned and put to work as evidence. Helen left the best of all husbands; left her child; left her dear parents; sailed. Why? Because beauty is what you love, and Aphrodite had told her where to look. The proof from myth is hardly finished before the mind slides sideways, the way a mind in love will: which reminds me now / of Anaktoria who is gone. And Anaktoria — a girl, absent, presumably married off across the sea — outshines, on this page, the cavalry of Lydia and every regiment under arms. The trick of the poem is that the comparison feels modest, almost reasonable. Her step. The light on her face. That is all.

Fragment 31: the body in pieces

The most famous song. A scene watched at close range — a girl talking with a man, and someone else, near, undone.

He seems to me equal to gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing — oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking is left in me

no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears

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

But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty...

There the song breaks. The papyrus tore. We do not know what it was to be dared. What we have is the body in pieces, named one by one. Tongue: breaks. Skin: fire. Eyes: no sight. Ears: drumming. Sweat: cold. Whole body: shaking. The colour: chloros, the pale-green pallor of young grass, of someone drained — greener than grass. And then the verdict, in the small voice of a self watching its own collapse: dead — or almost / I seem to me. The man across the table is the measure. He can sit there. He can listen close. He is godlike not for any virtue but for one ordinary feat — being able to occupy that chair, opposite that mouth, that laughter, and not come apart.

Two and a half centuries later the Roman Catullus would take this song into Latin almost line for line, lay it before a girl he called Lesbia after the island it came from, and let it loose on the European tongue. The trembling, the fire, the senses going one by one — every love poem since has carried some shard of this fragment.

Fragment 94: violets and oil

A parting. One girl leaves; the other will not be consoled. What follows is the consolation anyway — a list of what was shared, set down like a hand laid on a forehead.

Honestly I wish I were dead. She was leaving me with many tears and said this: "Oh what dreadful things have happened to us, Sappho. Truly I leave you against my will."

And I answered her: "Go and be happy, and remember me, for you know how we cared for you.

If not, then I want to remind you ]and beautiful times we had.

For many crowns of violets and roses ]at my side you put on

and many woven garlands made of flowers around your soft throat.

And with sweet oil costly you anointed yourself

and on a soft bed delicate you would let loose your longing

and neither any[ nor any holy place nor was there from which we were absent

no grove[ no dance ]no sound[

The catalogue breaks into white space. What survives is a life: violets braided at the brow, roses, garlands around the soft throat, perfumed oil, a soft bed, the loosing of desire on that bed, the holy places and groves visited together, the dances, the music. No guilt enters the list. No apology. The remembering itself is meant to do the work that the goddess does in Fragment 1 — to hold the beloved in place across a distance the body cannot cross.

Fragment 104a: evening star

Evening star, you bring back all things which the bright dawn scattered. You bring the sheep, you bring the goat, you bring the child back to its mother.

Probably part of a wedding song — the bride being led to the groom's house as Hesperos rises over Lesbos. Four lines, and a whole working day folded inside them. At dawn the world goes out: flock to the hillside, child to the field, husband to the boat. At evening the same world comes home: sheep, goat, child, husband, bride. The image has been borrowed and borrowed. The English poets borrow it: Sunset and evening star, / And one clear call for me. And the star of evening brings / All things home. The star was always Sappho's first.

Fragment 105a: the apple

As the sweet-apple reddens on the tip of the branch, on the tip of the topmost branch, and the apple-pickers have forgotten it — no, not forgotten, but they could not reach it.

Another wedding song, sung as the bride was led in. The apple is the bride. It reddens at the very top, where everyone could see it, where everyone wanted it, where no one's arm was long enough. The lovely correction inside the lines — no, not forgotten, but they could not reach it — is the whole tact of the poem. The bride was not overlooked. She was waited for. Someone has finally come who can reach.

Fragment 130: sweetbitter

Eros the melter of limbs (now again) stirs me — sweetbitter unmanageable creature who steals in

Two lines, and a word that walked out of Aeolian Greek into every European tongue. Glukupikron. Sweet first, bitter second — the order matters; the sweetness is what you taste, the bitterness is what comes after. Now again, as in the prayer to Aphrodite: not a first attack but the latest in a long series. And amachanon — against which no machine, no device, no trick, no plan of yours will hold. The creature steals in. The limbs go soft. There is nothing to be done about it, except, perhaps, to write it down.

Fragment 147

Someone will remember us I say even in another time

Three lines and a wager. Spoken, probably, to one of the girls in the circle — Atthis, Anaktoria, Gongyla, the named ones — who feared that none of this, none of the violets or the lamplight or the lyre, would last. I say. The verb is the gamble. Twenty-six centuries on, in another time, on another continent, in another alphabet entirely, the wager is paying out.

The smallest pieces

What follows are not poems but the last edges of poems — single lines that an ancient grammarian copied out to illustrate a metre or a dialect form, single phrases that survived because a scribe needed an example. Read them slowly. Each was once part of something longer.

]I don't know what to do: I am of two minds[

]I want and I yearn[

]you came. And I was mad for you. And you cooled my mind that burned with longing[

]pain penetrates me drop by drop[

]I took delight[

That is all that survives of each of them. Pain penetrates me drop by drop. Six English words for a Greek phrase from a longer poem we will never read again. It is enough.

And then there are the pages that look like this:

]dawn ]with ]carrying ]sing to us ]the one with violets in her lap ]mostly ]goes astray

The closing bracket on the left is the torn edge. Everything before it is gone — the start of every line, lost. The one with violets in her lap. We do not know who she is. We do not know the verb that was about to govern her. We do not know whether she is mortal or a goddess or a bride being teased at a wedding. She has been sitting there with violets in her lap for two and a half thousand years, half a line of someone else's poem, and she is unforgettable.

Fragment 58: old age

A fuller version of this song surfaced in 2004, in a strip of papyrus that had been used to wrap a corpse in Egypt. The poet is older now. The body that once trembled in Fragment 31 is no longer in that state.

]but my skin once soft is now taken by old age, my hair once black has turned white, my heart has become heavy, my knees that once danced nimbly like fawns cannot carry me. How often I groan about this. But what can you do? A human being cannot stay young.

They say that Dawn with her arms of roses carried Tithonus, beautiful and young, to the ends of the earth — yet still grey old age in time seized even him, though he had an immortal wife.

The story is the old warning. Dawn, who is Eos, the goddess with the rose-coloured arms, fell in love with the mortal boy Tithonus and begged Zeus to make him deathless. Zeus did. She forgot to ask for youth as well. The boy aged inside her arms forever, shrivelled, dwindled, chattered like a cicada. Even with an immortal wife at the ends of the earth, the grey took him. But what can you do? The question is asked from inside the same body that once turned green in Fragment 31. There is no philosophical comfort in the answer. There is only the fact, plainly stated. A human being cannot stay young.

The silence

The white space on every page is part of the poem now. We read these songs through their wounds — the lost first lines, the lost endings, the names of girls we will not meet, the hymns to Aphrodite that almost made it through and did not. It is the right shape for a body of work whose great subject was longing. Longing reaches and does not quite arrive. Memory keeps the violets and loses the verb.

What began on Lesbos in the early sixth century before the common era — a woman with a lyre, a circle of girls around her in a courtyard scented with myrrh, prayers sent to Aphrodite by name, wedding songs led out to meet the bride, the first person singular of private feeling taking the centre of the song — did not stop on Lesbos. It went to Rome through Catullus. It went to Provence through the troubadours. It went to Tuscany through Petrarch. It went to London through Shakespeare's sonnets, to Hampstead through Keats, to Amherst through Dickinson. Every lyric I that has trembled in front of a beloved on the page since has been, in some sense, the same I, calling on the same goddess, asking her to come now again.

Someone will remember us I say even in another time

This post is part of Civilisations, a 149-book chronological journey through world literature. See the full collection →

Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (Vintage, 2002) is the most influential modern translation — a work of art in its own right that preserves the fragments as fragments, using brackets and white space to honour what has been lost. Willis Barnstone's The Complete Poems of Sappho (Shambhala, 2009) is a more accessible alternative that fills in more gaps with a vivid, contemporary voice. Diane Rayor's Sappho: A New Translation of the Complete Works (Cambridge, 2014) is the most up-to-date scholarly edition, incorporating fragments discovered in 2004 and 2014. New fragments continue to be found — our knowledge of Sappho is still growing.

By Anne Carson. The most influential modern translation. Preserves the fragments as fragments, turning the gaps themselves into a commentary on desire and absence.