17 pages • 34 minutes read
SapphoFragment 31
Fiction | Poem | Adult | BCEA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
Like most of the other poetry composed in ancient Greece, Sappho’s poetry is lyric poetry, or, poetry created with the intention of being performed, sung and/or accompanied by music or a chorus of singers. She wrote in the Aeolic dialect, and her body of work, which exists mostly in incomplete fragments, reveals her unique writing style and direct approach to the complexities of love relationships. Only two complete poems and a series of poetic fragments have survived from the nine volumes of poetry she is supposed to have written during her lifetime.
As “Fragment 31” attests, Sappho’s lyrics are characterized by intense emotion, metrical sophistication, and direct honesty. Her love poems, in particular, are distinctive for their ability to reflect inner turmoil, as she addresses both pleasant and unpleasant experiences that are rich with deep emotion. From her famed collection of wedding songs celebrating a happy union, to her lament describing feelings of envy towards a rival, Sappho discusses the rich emotional life of humans who seek connection with others. Other important themes of Sappho’s oeuvre include fellowship and community, ritual and myths, political matters, and what it means to be good.
Plato referred to Sappho as the “Tenth Muse,” and she wrote in the Aeolic dialect in a range of meters. Modern-day scholars have named her unmistakably unique style as the Sapphic meter, or, the Sapphic form. Sapphic poems contain a series of stanzas, each with four lines made up of two kinds of metrical feet: trochees and dactyls (see: Literary Devices). The sonic effect of the Sapphic meter is one of abrupt starting and stopping, allowing the listener, or reader, only the briefest of pauses before the urgent tone of the lyric picks up the pace once again. Greek and Roman poets, like Catullus and Horace, used the Sapphic form for their own odes. As well, modern poets like Ezra Pound and Anne Carson have also employed the form.
Historical-Biographical Context
The poems of Sappho, who was born towards the end of the seventh century B.C.E., are some of the oldest literary works to survive to the modern age. The Epic of Gilgamesh and the epic poems of Homer are two of the only literary works that are older than Sappho’s lyrics. Sappho was supposedly born not long after the creation and transmission of The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Much of the historical data surrounding Sappho is inconclusive, giving her a kind of mystique, especially as many legends coexist alongside actual sources, lending Sappho’s true identity and history an elusive quality. Byzantine encyclopedias and marble tablets engraved with details about her life do exist, but the information often contradicts or clashes with other biographical sources. For example, Sappho may have been born in Eresos, a village in the southwest part of the Greek island of Lesbos, or, in Myteline, the capital and major port city of Lesbos. She is likely to have had two brothers, and it is widely accepted that she married and had a daughter. Sappho is rumored to have had love relationships with both men and women, and one of the most persistent legends concerning Sappho’s love life involves her death by suicide. Ovid is one of many voices who assert that Sappho died when she threw herself from the Leucadian rock, also known as the cliffs at Cape Lefkada, into the Ionian Sea when a younger man, a sailor named Phaon, did not return her love. Though this legend persists in many pop-cultural circles, other scholarly voices dimiss the story as fantasy and assert Sappho’s membership and participation in her female community in Lesbos as the central story of her life.
