Though it feels complete, the poem is a fragment: for some reason “Longinus” leaves off his quotation one line into the fifth stanza, which begins “Still, all must be endured, since even a poor…” Wherever Sappho was headed, Catullus goes a different way in the final stanza of his famous free translation, poem 51, here. Surely, however, that very “unpin-down-able” quality, that slippery multivalence under a limpid surface, the strangeness at the heart, is an intimate part of the poem’s appeal. That about says it all, though scholars have spent a lot of time trying to pinpoint the significance of the man in the first stanza, and whether Sappho’s symptoms are of eros or envy. All such things occur in the case of lovers, but it is, as I said, the selection of the most striking of them and their combination into a single whole that has produced the singular excellence of the passage” (10.3, trans. 18 A few fragments survive on other materials, including parchment and potsherds. The effect desired is that not one passion only should be seen in her, but a concourse of the passions. The two major sources of surviving fragments of Sappho are quotations in other ancient works, from a whole poem to as little as a single word and fragments of papyrus, many of which were discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt. treatise On the Sublime attributed to Longinus, with the following comment: “Are you not amazed how at one instant she summons, as though they were all alien from herself and dispersed, soul, body, ears, tongue, eyes, colour? Uniting contradictions, she is, at one and the same time, hot and cold, in her senses and out of her mind, for she is either terrified or at the point of death. Note: This deservedly famous poem is quoted in the first- or third-century A.D. Than summer grass, and death, I fear and feel,

He seems like the gods’ equal, that man, whoĪnd lovely laughter, which, as it wafts by,Īnd my tongue stiffens into silence, thinįlames underneath my skin prickle and spark,Ī rush of blood booms in my ears, and then

Sappho poems and fragments