variety of sensuous details which makes the
mood of approach and nearness unmistakable
(2.1–4, my translation):
Hither to me from Crete
To this holy temple
Where you will find your lovely grove of
apples,
And your altars perfumed with frankincense.
...At the end of thepoem it appears that
Aphrodite is wanted mainly to perfect some
mood of festivity, where nectar is being drunk.
But it is almost as though the goddess wouldbe
the perfection of that mood. Surely she will be no
Ganymede, trotting dutifully from cup to cup.
Finally, a more ‘objectified’ example of ver-
bal approach, the description of the wedding of
Hector and Andromache (Fr. 44). Here the poet
is not calling the wedding assemblytowardher;
she describes the movement of the newly married
pair toward Troy, and their joyous reception in
the city. Although the extant poem is badly muti-
lated, it is still suffused with a strong sense of
‘arrival.’ While projecting the situation into unlo-
calized objectivity, Sappho has miraculously
taken the place, in feeling, of a Trojan woman
welcoming home her leader and his bride. As she
describes the sound of cymbals, the holy songs
sung, the smell of incense in the streets, there is a
sense of being there, of witnessing the ‘coming.’
There is awareness of the place toward which
motion is taking place, though much less of the
motion itself.
Motion ‘away from’ a set point is a less
important dramatic theme in Sappho’s verse. In
Fr. 1 a brief passage of great technical refinement
shows both motion ‘toward’ and motion ‘away
from.’ Aphrodite is imagined having asked Sap-
pho, formerly, how she can help her win over a
recalcitrant lover. Aphrodite asks (18–24):
And whom must I now bend to your love—
Who is it, Sappho, who has wronged you?
For even if she flees you,
quickly will she pursue you,
And if she now refuses gifts,
tomorrow she will give them;
Yes, and if she loves you not to-day
soon will she love you, despite herself.
Departure from, and motion toward, an
established point—thepoet herself—are both
dramatized. The interaction of the two activities
is made especially tight through the embodiment,
in a single person, Sappho’s beloved, of both
forms of motion. Now she is fleeing, tomorrow
she will pursue.
Two of the major fragments of Sappho clearly
emphasize the notion of parting, and with it,
though not explicitly described, a sense of ‘motion
away’ from the poet. Fr. 96 is addressed to Atthis,
to console her for the loss of a girl who has gone
to Lydia:... how especially she loved your singing.
And now among the Lydian women she
shines....
Most of the remaining poem involves a sim-
ile, comparing the absent girl to the moon, which
is first among the stars, and shines placidly on
the stilled world. All emphasizes the beautiful
distanceof the absent girl. Only in the lines
quoted is her departure felt; the rest of the
poem makes the loss tangible.
Fr. 94 presents a dialogue between Sappho
and a friend who has left her. The dialogue is
introduced by: ‘‘she wept bitterly when she left
me and said to me....’’ Most of theremaining
poem, then, consists of Sappho’s attempt to con-
sole her friend—as she has done for Atthis, in
Fr. 96—for the parting. The consolation is a list
of pleasures the lovers formerly shared. Yet, as is
clear in the first line, ‘‘I wish in truth that I were
dead,’’ Sappho is not herself consoled. As Denys
Page says of this line:
... that was not said at the time of parting;
it is what she saysnow, when she recalls the
scene of parting and all that it means to her.
At the same time, she played the part of the
stronger spirit, the comforter, in the presence
of her distraught companion: today she
avows
a grief as great as her companion’s, or greater.
The time difference between the introduc-
tion to the poem, and the events recorded in its
dialogue, is telling. It dramatizes, as clearly as
the dialogue, the mood of departure which is the
whole theme of the poem....
Source:Frederic Will, ‘‘Sappho and Poetic Motion,’’ in
Classical Journal, Vol. 61, No. 6, March 1966, pp. 259–62.
Sources
‘‘Aphrodite Cult 1’’ and ‘‘Plants & Flowers of Greek
Myth,’’ inTheoi Greek Mythology, http://www.theoi.com/
Cult/AphroditeCult.html (accessed December 30, 2008).Fragment 2