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Love, Ceremony and Daydream in Sappho's Lyrics

Author(s): Robert Bagg
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Arion, Vol. 3, No. 3 (Autumn, 1964), pp. 44-82
Published by: Trustees of Boston University
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LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN
SAPPHO'S LYRICS

Robert Bagjg

Q
fc-^INCE SO FEW OF SAPPHO'S POEMS

survive, and these few have faced our attention for generations,
there is some danger that our effort to understand them will freeze,
that the rough richness of subliminal poetical meaning will be
rubbed bare like St. Peters toe too often touched. We tend to see
her poems as texts whose problems of interpretation have been
resolved as far as possible, a tendency helped by recent critical
insistence (though already losing its nerve) that poems are best
read by their own sweet light, without undue devotion to the
historical context, landscape or personality which may surround
them. The desirability of further evaluation and discussion of
Sappho has been also challenged from another direction by John
Hollander, who in the course of calling Catullus our first lyric
poet of consequence argued that our lack of any sense of Sappho's
native idiom prevented our gauging how she intensified speech
into poetry. Both reluctances seem to me timid, par
excessively
ticularly since the settled interpretation of Sappho's poems, lack
ing the critical rough and tumble surrounding Yeats, Shakespeare
or Rimbaud, suggests that Sappho's poems themselves may lack
or relevance. In order to return some and
vitality fluidity specula
tion to our reading of what are truly mysterious poems it may be
useful to re-examine some of our conclusions about use
Sappho's
of for instance, Lesbian love, and ac
autobiography, daydream,
cording to our post-Freudian understanding of these things.
One way to catch the newness of Sappho is to look again at her
sudden divination of her own personality's ability to comfort and
anchor others, an understanding of self which far surpasses
Archilochus' first assertion of it. In Archilochus we find comprising
the original autobiographical a secure awareness of a
impulse
personal viewpoint, rooted in his senses and referring constantly
to his own fife, astringently asserted against the disapproving
opinions of his fellow townsmen. This fragment suggests his tone:
No man, Aesimides, would experience much pleasure
who yielded to the censure of the people.
His poetry's sensuality, his understanding of the rhythms of ex
perience, his scraps of personal history, his malice, all appear to
derive naturally from his placing staunch value on his self. And
yet this first remarkable intuition of self also limits Archilochus,
 Robert Bagg 45
for his relentless squaring-off against other people perhaps pre
vents an understanding of his friends' effects on him or what he
gives to them. It is the whole give and take of sympathy, the
emotional interdependence of people, which is missing from
Archilochus' glimpse of the self. Sappho's repossession of the
powerful sympathy which passed between Patroklos and Achil
leus, Odysseus and Penelope was managed by imagining a "self*
which seems to embrace all her friends felt. Coming upon Sappho's
voice after Archilochus we are hers seems so
perhaps surprised:
vulnerable and introspective, though it is if anything more con
firmed in its pride. The audience suddenly shrinks from an entire
city to a few close friends, and in this new situation the auto
biographical poet finds that her own voice may assume and
register their personal problems and qualities.
It was natural for Archilochus to speak in his own person, to
taunt his audience with his thorny existence. The
opinions that set
him at odds with his contemporaries could be most tellingly
defended by pointing to their true source: the feelings imposed on
him by the urgent and puzzling events of his life. Nearly always it
was his outlook, his
irony and ideas, that Archilochus wished to
share, not the shaping experience that stirred just out of his full
consciousness. His claims on his life seldom go beyond
calling it
as a witness; his hearers were not to involve their lives
expected
with his.
Other fighters, mourners and lovers must have shared Archilo
chus' perception of why a weighty shield may be jettisoned, why
tears for the dead must be stanched, and the hair down a dancer's
shoulders must flow. But his poems do not draw upon other
in any we sense
people's feelings very complicated way. Certainly
no circle of intimates
responding to a vital symbolic action. It is
such communing moments, however, that we find in Sappho's
poems.
While Archilochus shared his opinions with his fellows, Sappho
shared the most elusive emotions, and to do so led her to use
language farmore allusively and symbolically. Most of the world's
business is carried on by communicating and exchanging opinions,
not emotions; but no can function without some
way to
society
share the other, too: rituals, festivals, art, and love.
dirges, Only
these have the sensuous guile that is needed in order to make
people aware of what is most in the world that they
life-giving
share.
The distinction between emotions and opinions is not a clear-cut
one, of course, since we transform them into each other with
a
bewildering abandon. (We desire girl, but she has not passed
from our sight before this event asserts itself as an opinion about
her desirability. ) As Wordsworth says, "Our continued influxes of
are modified and directed by our
feeling thoughts, which indeed
are representatives of all our past feelings."1 A pure opinion, then,
 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS
46

an idea drained of all stimulus to feeling and sensation, is strictly

impossible. Still, the idea is one thing and the stimulus another.
The stimulus iswhat makes the opinion count: the dagger or the
snarl in the talk of suicide or murder, the incipient erection under
the love song.
If we are moved by a bare opinion, itmust be that we are bring
ing to the thought our own unruly associations and energies.
Poems, however, do not require of us that we do all that work for
are as if by
ourselves. Our memories organized instantly and
magic. This is because in all poetry, even in the poetry of opinion,
like that of Archilochus, we are presented, not with a thought
alone, but with the presence of another human being crying,
never
shouting, whispering, cringing, or exhorting. The stimulus is
very far to seek. But now a further distinction must be made
between poems in which the thought remains the poet's thought
and is recommended to us by him, and poems which short-circuit
even this and the almost as our own.
process present experience
It is as ifwe were given the stimulus only and had towork through
to the opinion by ourselves.
Archilochus' work is tense with feeling, but we never forget
that it is his feeling before it is ours. He presents himself as
or an event, alone, with no His
pleasured ravaged by company.
us lose touch with a laconic and fre
ejaculatory style never lets
quently bitter even though his habit is to stimulate
intelligence,
a
feeling to opinion. His style of expression is goad to imagination
in the reader as pure opinion could never be. But Archilochus did
not yet perceive the opportunity of using poems to make people
aware of each other. His townsmen had several occupa
warmly
tions in which they could feel satisfactorily united; in war, festi
vals, mourning or political action. He did not see that poetry might
discover other more sensuous modes within this basic need.
Archilochus' genius was to use autobiography to make himself as
distinct as possible from everybody else.
In addition to the task of curing loneliness and bringing her
friends into contact with one another, the work Sappho's poems
coax the goddess Aphrodite into living
perform is occasionally to
presence. Now we can understand easily enough the task of work
or sexual excitement, and we
ing ourselves up to feelings of love
can appreciate in the abstract a priestess of an extinct creed
a divine presence. Unfor
charging the air with holiness and
tunately what these poems demand is the real presence of the
was
living goddess. But we cannot believe in Aphrodite, that she
ever really there. The best that we can do, therefore, is try to
understand why Sappho and her circle needed her. The fact that
we cannot join her in her literal purpose does not give us leave to
even if modern
forget or play down that purpose. In any case,
literature proceeds without any goddess, the epiphany, the mo
ment when a mystery is palpably shown forth, is again much
 Robert Bagg 47

prized. And if we consider Aphrodite in some of her less anthro

but no less incarnations, as sexual
pomorphic, mysterious passion
or as the mood which makes us
responsive to another's love, then
Sappho is telling our truth aswell as her own.
We will understand why Sappho's poems were drawn to this
rather work if we the unusual pressures
spectacular investigate
her life put upon her?the scene, as Kenneth Burke would say,
which contains her actions.2
We should imagine Sappho3 and her friends pursuing a life
distinct from that of her townsmen in Mytilene at least in this:
their feelings were deeply charged with female homosexuality or
lesbianism. Sappho's character and the nature of the life she and
her female friends lived have long been more an embarrassment
to scholars than an honest bafflement.4 Understandably, Sappho's
critics have been concerned to preserve her poetry from any
shameful aura which the likelihood of her sexual perversion might
cast upon it.We ought to realize, however, that the shame does
not rise from her poems, which are too frank and healthy to
comfort any attempt to degrade them. It comes from those whose
restricted sympathies are allowed to choke their pleasure in poetry.
But ifwe face the evidence for her lesbianism honestly, we might
learn something new about the impulse which creates in her work
a sense that when love is shared between females, both the danger
and the sweetness what a man and woman in love can
surpass
possibly feel of either.
The interests and texture of her poems are completely feminine;
they are devoted, as Denys Page says, to "her loves and hatreds;
the ephemeral pleasures and pains of an idle but graceful society;
her passion for a favorite, her jealousy of a rival."5 This is indeed a
modest range of subject, and yet Page's reflection of what happens
in a Sappho poem is far too easygoing. Wildness, abandoned
hysteria, pervasive the sudden arrival of tremendous
melancholy,
are
joy, consolation of great imaginative resourcefulness?these
what really fill her poems. Her society would have been idle and
to Marx's eye, but not to Catullus'.
graceful
I do not intend any rudeness or disparagement when I say her
poems have the same mindless delight in cascades of exact detail
that girls spend on clothes or in sharing confidences or just comb
ing each other's hair. When Sappho states an opinion she does not
back it up with a reason as a man would?she an
gives example
(Helen's ruinous attraction to Paris for example, in L. P. 16,6
"proves" that desire is the sovereign motivation) or she gives the
experience which dictated her opinion. Sappho seems to have
preserved in verse the slightest as well as the more heartbreaking
twinges of fortune she and the girls around her passed through;
she shows the same craftsmanship and care in giving advice to her
daughter Geis towear wildflowers instead of a ribbon band in her
hair as she does in her wish to die and see the lotus flowers of
Acheron. (L. P. 98,95)
48 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

An attempt to reconstruct Sappho's world and her daily life

from the poems and the fragments that have survived is a hazard
ous undertaking, of course. Very little can be
proved. The only
excuse for trying, I suppose, is that we cannot
help it.We have a
series of brilliant, tantalizingly vivid glimpses into a fascinating
world. To deny ourselves the pleasure of trying to put the pieces
together and make sense of them all would shear from them the
characteristic aura of autobiographical poems: on their
they take
full power and interest only when imagined in the context of the
poet's world. We know very much less about Sappho's Lesbos than
we do about, say, Catullus' Rome. But this means
only that we
must be humbler about the accuracy of our guesses; it
possible
does not relieve us of a duty to try to understand.
The intimacy of Sappho's circle seems to have been fervent and
exclusive. The male had no place in it, apparently, except to
wrench a girl from the group by marrying her.7 Sappho's marriage
did not affect her position; the sensitive, tensile threads of her
personality held the girls in an intimacy; the girls felt each other
through Sappho. In several poems we have a sharp picture of
Sappho taking a girl's emotional education in hand, showing her
how to read the difficult language of memory, sorrow, moonlight
or sexual success and how to answer other
girls in it. (L. P. 94, 96)
From the quality of concern in these poems we can say she
created and guaranteed a community of sensibility. That this
was devoted to townsmen did
community experiences Sappho's
not share and that the girls' otherness drew them fiercely together,
seems a reasonable we make the reckless
guess?unless fairly
supposition that all of the women in her town practiced female
homosexuality, or that none of her fellow citizens disapproved of
it. A mild form of such recklessness might be indulged, since
Sappho's extraordinary appreciation and appetite for the physical
beauty of young girls did have a sanction of sorts in some of her
island's customs, and in the Greeks' of Aphrodite.8 How
worship
ever, the extremity to which Sappho and her friends pursued the
appetite, almost to the exclusion of all other concerns, iswhat set
her group apart. We cannot be absolutely certain her society
looked askance at lesbian love, but we should accept as likely her
group's intimacy and apartness, which is asserted by the tone of
many poems and rises tantalizingly close to explicitness in this
bare line:

riva /cat
pivda-eaOal <f>aipu (ouj/epov) a/jtjuewv

I say that someone will remember us afterwards

(L.P. 147,tr.C.M.Bowra)

Maximus of Tyre compared Sappho and her rivals for the devo
tion of young Lesbian women to Socrates and the other philoso
phers who fought with similar spirit for the attention and love of
 Robert Bagg 49
Athenian Love, we know from the was also
youth.9 Symposium,
the emotion which drew the Socratic circle together, but in
Sappho's Mytilenian circle love did not have idealistic and intel
lectual aspirations directing it.10 Sappho's love seems to have been
transmutable into solace and communion, and most often
only
remains under the warm of as sexual excitement.
eyes Aphrodite
Delight in the feminine presence?the smile, the appeal of the
nubile body, the walking or dancing steps, the laughing and sing
and her as C. M.
ing voice, poise savoir-faire?pervade poetry,
Bowra as Bowra salutes its while
says, "inspiration." importance
remaining innocent of its implications: "She turned into poetry
woman
something inherent in the Lesbian admiration of young
hood and seems to have fashioned much of her life in its service.
.. .Towards these
girls Sappho felt what can only be called love.
When she speaks of it, she refers to epos and uses the verb
* iX
"11
epa/xcu.
Bowra's tone of calm sympathy does not recognize that such
love for another member of one's own sex is frightening and
unnatural. However and nonchalant Bowra and
understanding
we, ourselves, may be towards lesbian love, Sappho herself is
often unable to express this love without excruciation or madness
or abandoned vertigo; she loved always under the threat of some
sort of unhappiness. One may think that Sappho was exposing
herself, even by loving abnormally as she did, to no more than
man or woman at moment in or
any passionate any history
literature. But the evidence is otherwise, for the intensity of
torment and sweetness is far greater in hers than in any poetry of
her age or for hundreds of years thereafter. Homosexual love
to her not Homer or earlier
opened possibilities expressed by
or if
poets, who accepted erotic love as an appetite to be slaked,
love were thwarted or of it as a sickness; love
compulsive, spoke
for these men occurred in a minor or re-enforced some more
key
momentous motive or action. But sexual love to was the
Sappho
highest mode of life, the best there is, and since she could worship
love as the goddess Aphrodite, love held for Sappho the added
exhilaration of the holy. Pleasurable sensations were a sign of
the unpleasant ones also were an indication
Aphrodite's presence;
of the goddess' imminence, since only Aphrodite's intervention
could dissolve them in fulfilled sexuality. Pleasure and deprivation
were both needed to allow Aphrodite her full freedom of action,
since itwas the blessings she suffused through an otherwise barren
world which confirmed her divine powers. As she rendered the
bittersweet approaches of desire, splendidly brought into play in
the Ode to Aphrodite, L. P. 1, Sappho displays the secret of
sexual tension, an erotic process which Freud has carefully
analyzed in a passage quoted shortly. Iwill argue that the rhythms
and laws of sexual tension underlie several of Sappho's poems,
and that the reason why the several epiphanies of Aphrodite or
50 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHo's LYRICS

seizures of passion, which dispel various kinds of frustration, seem

psychologically right, is their reflection of this sexual tension.
has us an accurate of sexual tension in
Sappho given description
L. P. 31 and again in this pair of lines:

"Epos Srjdr? [i o ?voifi??Tjs Sovei,

yXvKVTTiKpov afx?xavov opnerov

Once Love, the looser of limbs, shakes me, an animal

again
bittersweet, inescapable.
(L.P. 130, tr.CM. Bowra)
On another occasion she announces her release from sexual ten
sion, ov $' epuv 7t60?) cooled my heart
exf/v^a^ <l>peva Kaiopbivav 'you
that was burning with desire.' (L. P. 48) That love must be bitter
in order to be in this of
sweet?yXvKviriKpov?Freud argues analysis
the ingredients of sexual tension:

I must firmly maintain that a feeling of tension must carry

with it the character of displeasure. I consider it conclusive
that such a feeling carries with it the impulse to alter the
psychic situation and thus acts incitingly, which is quite
contrary to the nature of perceived pleasure. But if we
ascribe the tension of the sexual excitation to the feelings of
displeasure we are confronted by the fact that it is pleasur
ably perceived. The tension produced by sexual excitation is
even in the prepara
everywhere accompanied by pleasure;
tory changes of the genitals, there is a distinct feeling of
gratification. What relation is there between this unpleasant
tension and this feeling of pleasure? . . .The eye, which is
very remote from the sexual is most often in
object, position,
during the relations of object wooing, to become attracted by
that particular quality of excitation, the motive of which we
designate as beauty in the sexual object. The excellencies of
the sexual object are therefore also called "attractions." This
attraction is on the one hand already connected with pleas
ure, and on the other hand, it either results in an increase of
the sexual excitation or in an evocation of it where it is still
. . .There is on the one hand the of pleasure
wanting. feeling
which soon becomes
enhanced by the pleasure from the
a
preparatory changes, and on the other hand, there is
further increase of the sexual tension which soon changes into
a most distinct feeling of displeasure if it cannot proceed to
more . . .How it that the
pleasure. happens perceived pleas
ure evokes the desire for that is the real
greater pleasure,
problem.12

We give an admiring wince to Freud's implacably clinical pursuit

of sex's excitements, but words are also exact.
complex Sappho's
 Robert Bagg 51
She embodies the tension and in
sensually personally greater
physical detail in L. P. 31, insisting as Freud does, that pleasure
and displeasure are inseparable. In that poem she feels herself
moving, inevitably, close to death, because failing the intervention
of Aphrodite, the flood of unpleasant sensation cannot be quelled;
death seems the only solution. Freud and Sappho are talking about
the same physiological phenomenon however divergent their re
sponses to it. If we do not take in the physiological reality in
words, we their and etherealize their
Sappho's pervert meaning
passion; only orgasm and tristesse can fulfill the tension inherent
in the sexual drama.
Several of her poems record this drama in terms less exclusively
sexual, exploring the rhythm from pain to pleasure which per
vades our emotional metabolism. Archilochus a similar
recognized
rhythm sending waves of fortune through life, though he did not
grasp the fact that the pleasure depended on the pain. What
Sappho's poems do is to discover the process which redeems tense
displeasure, bringing into play the inextricable connection be
tween and the somatic in whose waters tries to
pain pleasure pain
drown itself. The effect is such that when sexual tension or its
sublimated twin, emotional tension, is relaxed in the goddess'
presence, a benign personality seems to hold the world in her
charge.
The method Sappho used to attack and redeem a sufferer's
situation was to let each poem pass through a stage during which
the harsh pressure of reality is relaxed?an interlude of daydream
?out of which the sufferer as an Eleusinian celebrant
may emerge,
from the sea-bath, into satisfaction: a life whose troubles
purifying
have not been denied, but transformed, because we see their
value. Some she writes into her are a few lines
daydreams poems
a descent of or over sea
describing sparrows, moonlight spreading
and land, lush memories, a sensuous recommendation of an
apple
garden to Aphrodite13?any description which, though itmay offer
no logical comfort to the problems faced by the poem's characters,
offers a scene in which her listeners and intimates may dwell in a
sensuous trance. These of
trance-inducing pockets daydream pro
vide transitions from a world of pain and hopelessness to a world
of imminent happiness and fulfillment. In order to understand
why daydream images accomplish this extraordinary result we
need only recall their purpose in humdrum life.
When we slide into daydream, most of the obstacles to the
completion of our wishes, either of inhibition or practicality, fall
away. Temporarily, the mind is dissuaded from glancing nervously
at reality and the daydream spins on. The most important property
of daydream imagery, either the kind used in Sappho's verse or in
the windownook, is that it be free of any jolt which reminds the
dreamer that he is to an denouement,
proceeding extraordinary
outlawed by his normal experience. The value of the mood culti
 52 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

vated by these islands of pleasing imagery (which

usually appear
in the middle of her poems, soon after the source of trouble is
made clear) is as a climate into which a divine event, wary of the
mind's resistant make its entrance. This climactic event,
light, may
often the one Sappho frankly asks, is the arrival of Aphrodite,
either in her own person or in her disguise as the onset of sexual
feeling. Her failure to appear, as in L. P. 31, leaves the poem in
agony. Aphrodite's arrival ends the need for daydream by carry
ing the bittersweet tension to a quelling conclusion; in the goddess
the sufferer's beleaguered desires are indulged, and relaxed. (This
comparison I am making between purely sexual and emotional
tension shows Aphrodite behaving in the higher realms of love
as orgasm behaves in the
physical realm. This kinship will not
be rejected by the goddess of sexual intercourse; she was born,
after all, in this fashion according to Hesiod: Uranos' erect phallus
was severed
by Cronos at the moment of ejaculation and fell
into the sea; thereupon Aphrodite was born of the foam.14)
The purest example of a poem which draws its strength from
a daydream is L. P. 2, an apparently unclouded summons to
Aphrodite. The deprivation which demands the daydream is the
fact that itmust be recited at all?that Aphrodite is not already at
hand among her devotees is the source of tension. Almost the
whole poem is a description of the pleasures Aphrodite will enjoy
when she arrives, but the real audience for these pleasures is
circle, the who are to be convinced, as much as the
Sappho's girls
that the place and moment are aphrodisiac.
goddess herself,

Sevpv fi KKptfras ?it[? r?vSje vavov

V l?*v oXgos
?yvov, 07nr[at ro?] x?P?
-
[iaX?[av], ?uyLOLS? T 0u/u?f?
voi
[Xi]?avt?TO)t.
v
iv S* vB?)p i/tvxpov KeX?Set, Si* vaS
Se Trat? o x&P?S
fiaXlvcov, ?poSoim
ccr/a'acrr', aidvaaou, va)v Se
<f>vX?u)V
K?jfia Koreppet,.

hnro?oros ridaXev
iv Si XelpLwv
?vdecrw, iv S* ?rjrai
ripivoiaw
wv okw[
p.?X\ixa
[ ]
V$a Srj cv
OTC/x/iar' lAotcra, Kwrp?,
XpvalaiGiv iv KvX?K acriv ??pws

op,p. pL ?XfJ>vov BaXlaicri veKrap

olvox?o.?oov\

Come tome from Crete to this holy temple,

a
Aphrodite. Here is grove of apple
 Robert Bagg 53
trees for your delight, and the smoking altars
with incense.
fragrant
Here cold water rustles down through the apple
branches; all the lawn is beset and darkened
under roses, and, from the leaves that tremble,
sleep of enchantment
comes Here is a meadow
descending. pasture
where the horses graze and with flowers of springtime
now in blossom, here where the light winds passing
blow in their freshness.
Here in this place, lady of Cyprus, lightly
lifting, lightly pour in the golden goblets
as for those who a festival, nectar:
keep
wine for our
drinking.15

My approach to this poem relies on our remembering that to

the Greeks Aphrodite was two things: a Uve though rarely visible
goddess, and also a condition of the human personality responsive
to love, spring and friendship. The poem manages to speak to both
of Aphrodite's "incarnations"?in Olympian flesh and in Sappho's
female listeners. With the same words with which Sappho begs
the goddess to drop what she is doing on Crete and land in her
Lesbian precinct, Sappho tries to arouse sensual readiness in her
girls by dwelling on several voluptous physiological symbols, each
of which contributes a distinct affect to a particular sense; together
these the the trance or coma,
symbols prepare dreamy openness,
into which Aphrodite may flush.
Aphrodite was associated in her established cults with apples,
flowers, andhorses, as these titles of hers tell:
gardens firjXeia,
avOeia, iv k7J7tol<s,tynnros.16 should these be associ
Why images
ated with the goddess of sex? In the masque of desire, apples
perform for ruddy and firm lolling breasts, (as on the tree from
which we have been forbidden to eat), flowers for the gently
yielding vagina (as in our phrase "to deflower"), gardens for the
we have been
sleepy darkness of sex (like the garden from which
expelled), horses for its graceful energy (or flesh: "horseflesh");
these associations, of course, never rise to
explicit recognition,
though they influence, with their flesh-tones, with their stirring of
love's the surface, which hides them as a smile
preparation, poem's
would. What Sappho does in this poem is to "grow" a garden
where sensual responses are reached with the indirect power only
available to symbolic language. The subtlety with which she ad
ministers these strong elixirs may be seen in the three phrases of
the second stanza. The cold water suggests a chilly frisson,
whether we imagine a hand plunged into it, or sense its noisy
presence at a distance as we do here; this chill "rustles" through
us to the shivery gooseflesh of naked
lolling apple limbs, guiding
54 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

and mature breasts. The roses fill the darkness of the lawn with
the damp skin of the loving body. In the final amazing phrase
"from trembling leaves sleep slides down" a coma (which does
not mean the sleep of fatigue at all, but of magic exhilaration;
'sleep of enchantment' or 'hypnotic daze' more nearly render its
force, ) as palpable as the leaves, affects all who come into the
dark garden. By claiming for those leaves a direct effect on the
celebrants?the subdued excitement of glittering leaves prepares
the mind to receive sleep and Aphrodite?Sappho implies that all
the attributes of the garden also have access to the celebrant's
resonses. As modern readers, to more naked, less
deepest exposed
allusive sexual literature, we may find ourselves insensitive to the
impressions I have recorded here. Some discipline is needed to
manage a passage into Sappho's world, though I doubt whether
an intuitive recognition that the subject of Sappho's poem is sex,
and not horticulture, eludes many. Skeptics are possibly impatient
for me to deal with their objection that Sappho and the Greek
world were not "freudwise" as we have become, and therefore
no significance of the kind I find was "intended" by Sappho as she
cultivated her charming stand of trees. To this I return that the
Greek world's perception and use of phallic and vaginal symbols
the the snake and the as em
?mock-phalluses, omphalos; apple
blem of sexual far more natural, intense and
temptation?was
than our own. These sexual devices also were re
widespread
as sacred, and an attitude we seem un
garded healthy potent,
likely ever to regain. A reader of Jane Harrison's Prolegomena to
the Study of Greek Religion or Frazer's The Golden Bough could
not help but notice the sophistication with which the entire sexual
life of the ancient world was reflected in their choice of epithets,
for instance. Homer concludes the first book of the Iliad with the
lines:

Zc?? 8c irpbs ov ?c^o? r[C OXv/i7rto? ?orcpoTn/T^c,

v0a ir?pos KotpaO ore fiiv yXvKvs virvo? ucdvoC
V$aKa6evS ava?ds, irapa 8c xpucroo/oovoc H.prj?
(II. 1.609-611)

Zeus the Olympian and lord of the lightning went to

his own bed, where always he lay when sweet sleep came on
him.
Going up to the bed he slept and Hera of the gold throne
beside him.17
By his mischievous choice from among the couple's many possible
epithets, Homer is a bawdy trick on certain of their tra
playing
ditional roles.
How can Sappho know whether or not her summoning of
Aphrodite has been successful? Presumably the goddess is sup
 Robert Bagg 55

posed to be there if the girls are flushed with desire. Trying to

reconstruct such a happening we find an insoluble question which
we cannot
help but ask ourselves. Which of these four possibilities
seems most likely:
1 ) Sappho composed these poems in advance and actually used
them in her seances, and by their use she produced the desired
effect in the girls. 2) She conducted her seances with less fore
and more ecstatic of the moment, and these
thought inspiration
are reconstructions of some of her better efforts in this
poems
fine. 3) These lyrics are not reconstructions but poems in a literary
genre?a genre that still drew its life from actual rituals of prayer
and celebration which were currently practised in Sappho's com
munity. On this supposition none of these poems reflects what she
herself actually sang at any given event, however. 4) The poems
were composed as a purely literary tradition using a fictitious
persona, someone whose life and activities were not
by necessary
like those of "Sappho," at all.
We cannot rule out any of the four as impossible. But the
fourth possibility almost entails that the poems were written by
a woman who did not live among
girls, who did not feel attracted
to and moved by female beauty, and was not a devotee of the
goddess Aphrodite. Surely this possibility is significantly harder
than the others to a scene with
accept. Sappho's poems imply
people, tensions and triumphs in it; to dispense with the woman
Sappho and replace her with a ghostly "speaker" would cheat us,
for insufficient reason, of the drama's real complexity, its depth
of and social reverberation. If we were to a
personal postulate
"speaker" of this poem, we would risk squelching the exhilaration
we feel inwatching a woman finding that her voice and emotions
have importance both to her and to her poems. Like Archilochus,
she discovered that her self had a public use and value, and her
are with the freshness of the If we com
poems ripe discovery.
pare the humble use Homer made of his literal self we sense why
Sappho took possession of hers with such substantiality and pride.
Homer called the Muse into his imagination, asking her to tell
the epic events through his voice. The heroes and speeches, battles
and emotions which inhabit the hexameters flowing from this first
prayer carry the Muse's divine authority. Instead of yielding the
floor to the Muse's fiction, Sappho does something new. She calls
the goddess into her life, she summons her to come in a chariot
(L. P. 1). The implications of this momentous change of address
and expectation perhaps explain the awe Sappho commanded
even in her own lifetime, an awe revealed by another poet, prob
ably her fellow islander Alcaeus, who spoke of "Violet-crowned,
holy, sweetly-smiling Sappho." (L. P. 384) As the fine suggests,
a share in the most blessed
Sappho assumes for her living self
form of life the Greeks could imagine, that of the Olympians.
While Homer sang as an inspired historian, she crashes through
 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHo's LYRICS
56

to where the most intense life is, and finds it in her own experience
as a lover and friend. By becoming her own source of impulse
and incident she implicitly claims for herself the divine aura
which in the epics belonged to the Muses. Sappho alters the
traditional dependence of human emotion on the gods in a way
which cannot help but exercise her self-awareness. She feels the
crises of passion not exclusively as wounds inflicted by Aphrodite,
but as thrills and sorrows to be cherished because they reveal
that there is something in Sappho's own body which rises to
Aphrodite, which communicates to her; something which the
goddess must respect because it is holy. This altered tone, quite
distinct from Archilochus* of thwarted as un
expression passion
ambiguous misfortune which loses its divine glow as soon as it
enters his body, is perceptible everywhere, as in these lines from
her ode:
great

acraiat p,n S ov?aiat S?jxva

pJq p,
TTorvia, Bvpuov (L. P. I.)
neither with sorrows nor crush,
pangs,
Queen, my heart.

The of irorvia, in close touch with Qvpjov>

placement "Queen,"
"heart," in the short line is almost a desire that the two be part
ners, or at least allies. Throughout her poems Sappho respects her
own feelings and the beauty she observes as if their holiness were
as breathed into it by Aphrodite;
generated as much by human life
most likely she felt the human and divine origins as inextricable.
This sense of partnership and shared existence allow Sappho to
talk familiarly to Aphrodite and beg favors. Sappho was indis
set this
pensible to her community of sensibility because she
unusual value on her and others' and because, as I noted
feelings,
earlier, she could evoke the sensation of Aphrodite using sensual
exact attention to
symbolism, lulling daydream, and by paying
the physiological basis of emotion.
Another resource, of a kind we sometimes call "technical,"
which springs from her acceptance of her life as subject matter,
with its swarm of pasts and temporary present, was her discovery
that she could appear in her poems at more than one moment in
their implied historical time. Using this strategy she was able to
receive the daydream?and share it?from the same position as her
listeners. She stations herself nearer to her audience's viewpoint
by frequently dividing heself into
two Sapphos?the living voice
pronouncing the poem and the remembered self who appears and
as a character. This division does not what we call
speaks provide
"detachment." purpose The the creation of a present
behind
and a past Sappho might seem to encourage an effort
Sappho
to comprehend the past intellectually. But to view the division of
herself as an attempt to analyze and understand is to neglect the
 Robert Bagg 57

dazed, hypnotized nature of the confrontations between the two

Sapphos in L. P. 1, 27, and 94. The gesture Sappho makes is to
attempt to touch this past self and long to rejoin it.
Such a separation from her speaking self is what also joins her
to us?we all reach back into the poem's oubliette, into the prison
with one window. And this gesture yields none of the wisdom
which "detachment" would imply. The limits of rationality, in
fact, are what this must overcome. To comfort a friend
gesture
desolate at the prospect of leaving Sappho is not a job even the
calmest reasoner can well perform. The friend hungers for the
a a
body and mind of departed person, not philosophy of absence.
must find a different, illogical way of preserving an
Sappho
she must evoke a on a sound
intimacy; personality, place nostalgia
basis. In L. P. 94, a perfect shared daydream, Sappho does this.

redvaKTjv 8' dSoX s diXoi'

a p. KareXlpmavev
ipiaSouiva

iroXXa Kal roo* L7r\e poi'

ttH/x' ? Sc?va 7T 7r[?vO]au V,
a ??Koia* dirvXiuirdvu).
Wa7r<f>*f 7} pdv

r?v S' cyt? tclS' dp, i?op.av

XalpoLo* pX 0 Kapiedev
pipvata*, o?ada y?p a>s ce TreSrpTOUtv

al Se prj, dXXd er* eya) 6iXa)

ouvaioat <u
[.].[....]..
6a[aa p6X6aKa] Kai KaA' cVaor^o/zcv*

OT v
7t6[XXois y?p <j>dv\ois ?
Kai ?p\po(A)V or^a]/a'a>v t' vp.01
7T pe8r?Kao,
K?[vqra>] trap epoi

Kai 7T?[XXais vTTa~\6vp.iSas

irX?K\nrais dp</>* a\7rdXai Sipai

dvOiwv [??aXec] ir 7ro7)p.p, vais,

Kai Trdvrai \X17rdpais] pivpoji

vd L(X)l.[ . .
?p "]pv[ ]V
i?aXeit/jao Ka\l ?acrjiXrjiwt,

Kai arp p.v[av IJttI p,oX9dKOV

?TTaXav ira. [ . . .wv
]
V
??It]S tt09o{v a?i/ia a\vf?<av9

K?)VT rt
[ris \6pos ovre]
LpovovS* v[ ]
CTtAct' OTT7t[o6 V ap?]p. S ?W(7KO/Z l>,

ovK
cHXcros.[ ]*P?S
"]l?J?<f)OS
. . .otStat
]
58 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

Honestly I wish to die. She left me with many tears, and this
she said to me: 'Alas, how sad is our plight; Sappho, truly I
leave you unwillingly.' And these words I answered to her:
'Go and remember me; for know how we cared
gladly you
for you. If not, I would remind you ... of all the gentle and
beautiful times we had. For many garlands of violets and
roses and vinetendrils you put around
yourself at my side,
and many necklaces woven of flowers you flung round your
soft neck, and everywhere with royal scent made from flowers
anointed . . . and on soft . . .
you smoothly beds, gentle you
. . . for and there was no dance
put away longing maidens,
and no shrine nor . . . from which we were absent ... no
noise .. ,'18
precinct...
This flowerchain of little remembered pleasures, carelessly
strung on Sappho's tense purpose, becomes a daydream shared by
the Sappho speaking the poem's present words as well as the
departing girl and the Sappho who speaks to ease the pang of
leavetaking. These three distinct minds are absorbed into the
reverie, perhaps also intended to comfort what listeners it orig
inally had. But why should such a caressing daydream of things
never to happen again be a comfort?one would think that by
these tactics the hopelessness of the girls' situation is glumly con
firmed. The hopelessness is certainly intensified, but it is also
given roots in their past fives?the loss now gripping both women,
Sappho immensely reminds her friend, cannot be separated from
the loss and suffering which cling to all sweet and satisfying mo
ments. It seems to me that the ache of parting becomes fused
with the ache of satiety; and both then with the painful throb of
which must accompany the sensual
anticipated gratification pleas
ures revives. Like the the
Sappho pleasures, hopeless separation
will the memory in otherwise unavailable bittersweetness,
steep
and is therefore to be welcomed. The laden memory becomes an

arena, similar to their last larks of erotic non

Sappho suggests,
sense, but from now on
memory will be arrested in a state of
sweet frustration. The intensest moments of past and future will
melt into each other.
At the start of the fragment Sappho admits how demoralized
she is now, speaking the poem, far from the brave version of her
self she records. She speaks a8o?<o? "undeceivingly," and confesses
a wish to die she
presumably concealed from the tearful girl. Her
is a remarkable S?Xos or "charm" which re
daydream, however,
laxes this wish by dissolving this harsh present impasse into the
idyllic past. When the girl addresses Sappho in her cri de coeur,
"Alas how sad is our plight, Sappho, truly I leave you unwillingly":

Wdirj?, f? fidv a* ??tcoia* ?TrvXipLTrdvu).

 Robert Bagg 59
the words seem to travel along with Sappho from the time she
heard them until she repeats them in her own voice. And the
?? Seiv? looks back at their common as
phrase ireirovOapitv past ap
proaching the intensity of suffering. The girl's words open back
wards into Sappho's fife as well as mourn the empty future.
uses our awareness of her historical existence to
Sappho present
her life as deep, long and continually vulnerable to experience.
The wealth of events she names, from many
obviously separate
times, strengthens this illusion of life stretching away from a single
climactic moment. Such a temporal perspective was hinted at in
Archilochus, but it emerges in Sappho with the force of originality.
Erich Auerbach has overemphasized the point, when he argues
the absence of any dramatic opposition between past and present
in Homer:

But any such creat

subjectivistic-perspectivistic procedure,
ing a foreground and background, resulting in the present
lying open to the depths of the past, is entirely foreign to the
Homeric style; the Homeric style knows only a foreground,
only a uniformly illuminated, uniformly objective present.19
Auerbach overlooks the depths of the past open to Odysseus when
he weeps as Demodocus
sings, (and when he himself tells of his
beleaguered past at the Phaeacian court) ; and to Achilleus as he
hears old Phoenix ramble on. But itmay still be pressed that what
opposition exists, what sense of the past we find in Homer, as in
the various reunion scenes in the Odyssey, (the recognition of the
bed's olive trunk by Odysseus and the melting of Penelope into
his arms) or in the visitation of Patroklos' ghost to the sleeping
Achilleus, what we have are overtones, echoes, not the work of
a voice into time in order to redeem the present,
probing reaching
the voice we hear Sappho using.
on
Sappho also uses the girl's living body as a present reality
which to "place" the emotions of the past: the memories depend
on a sense of touch?around the woven flowers
girl's body go many
and the massage of rich ointments, and, as
??lrjs wo?o(v vea)vlSa)v,
"you put away longing for young maidens," tells us, the bodies of
other The reason touch dominates the sensations
young girls. why
remembered is clear enough. Touch and physical closeness will go
beyond reach when the girl sails, whereas the losses of sight and
sound of voice may more easily be restored by the mind's eye and
the word sounding in memory or on papyrus. Carried to a bio
logical and emotional extreme, delight in touch and physical
closeness become sexual intercourse. After the petals and the
perfume on the hair and soft neck, Sappho continues
Kal crrpc?fiv[avi]irl ?loXdaKov
?iraXav .. .wv
7ra.[ ]
*?irjs tt66o\v V (l\vIS<?v
60 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO's LYRICS

The girl emerges from her 7ro0o?by indulging it. The words e??r?<?
tt?Oov "you put away longing" delicately bring to life the fact of
the sexual attachments. Homer uses a similar
girl's frequently
expression to say a hero put aside desire for food by eating, or
grief by crying.20 That Sappho thought of desire as something to
be stilled by use can be shown by this fragment, quoted and
translated earlier, L. P. 48, "you cooled my heart that was burning
with desire." Since Sappho is gathering for her friend their ex
periences with the most claim on them, it is natural that sex be
them as the and most intense. Allusion to sexual
among sovereign
intimacy is followed by others to festivals and religious cere
monies, perhaps of the kind for which L. P. 2 is nearly a scenario.
A progression from touch through lovemaking to religious emotion
may be traced in the daydream. The spiritual destination of their
sensual life seems to be the emphasis of the poem, though we
could only be certain if we could read the whole of it. Aphrodite
seems about to arrive. What trembled as the cause of the girl's
tears at the start because it was sensual and becomes a
vanishing,
can take x^lpoio-' "gladly" off the island.
sensibility which the girl
This sensibility does not depend finally on thoughts, always on
sensation; but not the symbolic sensation of the poem summoning
Aphrodite to the rose garden. The genius of the poem is to trans
form what was felt as vanishing to the sense into what stays
sensual in the memory. The be seen as a tactful draw
poem may
are
ing upon the tears of the departing girl. Tears as they flow
an enlarged wallowing in thoughts that hurt and dis
paralyzing,
a
figure. By leading her from barren pain via daydream, memory
escapes from thoughts that stun into images that move, so that
consolation is achieved when life begins to flow again in its
cherished bittersweet channel.
a concern
Sappho's gift often shows this strong social impulse,
for the emotional health of her charges; her poems seem created
to provide needed modi vivendi and not to stand autonomous, as
now stand for us. Her method was to create a train of
they images
designed to awaken and draw upon the sensibility her circle
shared in daily life and find in these images the solution of a
we have seen her do in the two
pressing emotional problem, as
longer poems already looked at.
In L. P. 96 Sappho performs another conjuration with sensi
bility:

WGTT.<?0[X V,.x
ae 0 <u a Ik?Xov apt"
yvwrat, trat Se
?xdXiar ?xatpe ?x?Xrrai*

vvv Se AvSaiGLv
ipmpenerai ywai
K GGLV, ?J? TTOT dcXLuJ

SvvTos ? ?poSoodKTvXos GeXdvva

 Robert Bagg 61

7rdvra 7T ctti
/)(p)e^ota* acrrpa* <}>do$ 3'
a^ t ddXaGGav in* dXfxvpav
LGOJSKai TToXvavdipLois ?povpais'

a S' KaXa redd

(i)epGa Keyprai^
XaiGL Si ?poSa KCLTTaN av

BpvGKa koX fxeXiXajros ?vdeixojSrj?'

v?XXa Si ?a^otrator' dydvas im

?ivaGdeiG* ?rOiSos ifiipoji
Xirrrav itoi acrai
<j>pivam Kap (S') ?opr^rai.

When we hved all as one, she adored you as

symbol of some divinity,
Arignota, delighted in your dancing.
Now she shines women as
among Lydian
into dark when the sun has set
the moon, at last
pale-handed, appeareth

making dim all the rest of the stars, and light

afar on the salt sea,
spreads deep,
spreading likewise across the flowering cornfields;

and the dew rinses glittering from the sky;

roses spread, and the delicate
antherisk, and the lotus spreads her petals.
So she goes to and fro there, remembering
Atthis and her compassion, sick
the tender mind, and the heart with grief is eaten.21

Atthis is the lonely girl at Sappho's side; the missed girl, thought
of as "arignota," (or Arignota: it might actually be her name)
which means a goddess who "manifests herself' as Athena would
to fives across the water at Sardis. The
Odysseus, consoling day
dream into which Sappho conducts Atthis has the purpose of a
seance: to procure a signal that the girl in Lydia is alert to their
sorrow and shares it. Sappho begins to evoke this girl with what
appears to be a traditional comparison: her ?clat in Lydia is as
pre-emptively brilliant as the moon's. The manner in which
on is
Sappho develops and relies this comparison probably not
borrowed from tradition; it depends on an extraordinary tight
knit sensibility prevailing among her charges. The distant girl
assumes a physical presence in the dramatic situation of the poem;
the moon is felt to contain some of her loveliness. Her meta
morphosis into the visible moon ismoving, especially if we think
of Sappho and Atthis looking out over the sea at the real moon
rising. The moon is both a mental image of comparison and a sight
to behold; and the longed-for girl's essence flows easily from the
62 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

one into the other. At this relaxes or rather sub

point Sappho
merges the of the moon to the in order to concen
comparison girl
trate her description on the <f>do<s,
"moonlight," lighting up sea and
land, and to tell what effect the moonlight has on what it touches.
A girl cannot speed across the straits but fight can. The seance
will be less threatened by ridiculousness if the moonlight travels
free of explicit identification with the girl. Her beauty and
far-off-ness and are from the moon.
presence implicitly emanating
But these attributes are illusory, fostered by the poem's daydream.
By seeming to remove Atthis from the center of attention and
dwelling on the light Sappho perhaps makes Atthis and her
listeners feel an uncanny confidence that their friend's personality
is spreading toward them. To preserve this dazed inkling she
follows the light's journey for six lines. That light, the Greeks
believed, encouraged the dew to drench the roses and lotus flowers
and make them blossom. Since the light has become the girl,
radiant, absent, lonely, the response of the flowers to her shining
must affect Atthis, as the lines 15-17 suggest, to the roots of her
being. The dew reviving the flowers has two sets of associations
which increase the poignance these fines already have. Mention
of the "rose," and "melilotus," could not help but recall the days
when Atthis and Arignota picked precisely these blossoms to string
on their endless necklaces. The falling of the flower-opening dew
was also one of the natural oversaw,
phenomena Aphrodite surely
the association of dew with and fruitfulness was not far
sperm
beneath the surface of any Aeolian imagination. Aeschylus has
us a account
given splendid of the dew's significance. The frag
ment is from a lost play called The Danaids. Aphrodite speaks it:

The pure sky longs passionately to pierce the Earth, and pas
sion seizes the Earth to win her marriage. Rain falling from
the bridegroom sky makes pregnant the Earth. Then brings
she forth for mortals pasture of flocks and corn, Demeter's
gift, and the fruitfulness of trees is brought to completion by
the dew of their marriage. Of these things am I part-cause.22

A glitter of both former happiness and alienation from fruitful sex

underlies the dew.
When Sappho ends her "brown study" she returns to the girl
aimlessly pacing in Lydia, whose direct apprehension of Atthis
attacks her heart with yearning and heaviness, a dramatically
right response to the sadness which the journey of the light has
conveyed to Atthis. The act of consolation Sappho performs is to
fill the empty night and the desolate mind of Atthis with an
answering grief-eaten image of her loved friend.
The next lines of the poem cannot, in good conscience, be
sense:
jostled into complete
 Robert Bagg 63
LGa r? S' ov
KrjOi S' eXO-qv ?ft/*. [..]..
V??VT a [. .] VGTOWfX [..(.)] 7T0?V?

yapve? [..(.)] aXoy ['.....(.)] q [X ggov

Something, it seems, however, "comes hither to us." And someone

"calls," yapvei- Could Sappho and Atthis be hearing the call of the
Lydian girl across the sea? (/?co-crovperhaps referred to the shouts
lost or travelling through the "middle distance.") If the shouts
did carry to Atthis' ears, Sappho might very well be following the
Homeric maxim that you can always hear a man in his need:
Glaukos is here appealing to Apollo:

"Wherever are can listen to a man in

you you pain"
(II. 16. 515)
Perhaps the arrival of Aphrodite in line 26, in a climactic
ephiphany,
A<f>poSira
Ka/x [ ] V KTOpx<ev ?irv
XpVGias

a
Aphrodite poured nectar from golden (bowl)
was designed to remind Atthis of the rapport they enjoyed to
gether, at rites similar to those in the applegrove of L. P. 16. By
line 29 IIci&o, "Persuasion," has also arrived, but the text then
disintegrates without feeding further speculation.
Sappho discovered that yearning for absent friends may be
satisfied in some measure by a poem which revives cherished
memories, or plays upon the antiphonal healing quality of regret
separated people may imagine rising in each other. What right,
we may wonder, does a poem have to perform these things? On
the evidence, Sappho's world accepted her poems as moving
can see from the
beyond aesthetic into a social usefulness. We
poem that we just looked at, from the heaped memories in L. P. 94
which work to still a wish to die, and from the two invitations to
Aphrodite to join Sappho on earth, that a poem was considered
to be a medium inwhich events not possible in a life ungraced by
poetry could happen. Poetry was magic, in the sense that con
vincing someone without the aid or against the wishes of logic is
a magical accomplishment. Sappho's personality and voice were
as the arrival of Aphrodite or com
capable of staging such events
munion with a friend over the water. Our sense of Sappho as a
source of her protegees' confidence in these magical performances
increases as we read all her poems in this light. Her poetry
"the poem is designed
responds well to Kenneth Burke's thesis that
to 'do something' for the poet and his readers, and that we can
make the most relevant observations about its design by consider
in
ing the poem as the embodiment of this act."23 It is relevant,
Sappho's case, to ask ourselves what the exact emotional problems
64 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

were which the poem faced and how

Sappho designed her poems
and mustered her range of tone and metaphoric transformations
to deal with these problems. Our interest in her poems derives
from them work as "solutions" as well as from
seeing marking
their tenderness for suffering. Her personality exists for us because
it acts in a world the poem does not circumscribe, and cannot be
held irrelevant without denying that "magical" healing aspect her
poems had for their original audience, and for us, since that
audience is not only everywhere implied, and frequently ad
dressed, but includes Sappho herself, as in L. P. 1.
Not always, however, does she charm away her suffering. At
least once we find her unable or unwilling to use the healing
we watch her sexuality brewing gall instead
strength of poetry and
of the prized honey; this occurs in a famous and I think incom
pletely understood poem, L. P. 31:
igos Ocolgiv
<f>alv ral ?loi Krjvos
fipi V* WVTJp, OTTLS ivdvTiO? TOI
loSdvei koI irXaGiov ?Sv ^corn
era? vnaKovet

koI yeXa'iGas Ipt-ipoev,r? ?l f? fi?v

KapSlav iv GnqdeGiv irrroaiGev
cos y?p es*g* ?Soj?pox*> ?s /? ^Sc?rat
G OVO V T ?K L,

oAA* ?Kdv 7T 7ray , X?nrov

fiiv yXCjGGa
S' avriKa XP&1 ^vp v^a.SeSpofirjK?v,
oTrrrdreGGi S' ovS* iv opr??x?i$
?7ripp?[i
?eiGi S* OLKovai,

kolS Se [t ?Sp s KaKX^rai, rpopuos Se

Tra?oav ?ype?, ^?coporepa Si Trota?
T 0vdK7]VS' ?X?yOiVlScify?
fJL[Xl,
<?>a?vo[M9?Acua.

That man seems to me to be the equal of the gods, who sits

and, near to you, listens to you as
opposite you you speak
sweetly and laugh your lovely laughter; that in truth has set
my heart fluttering inmy breast. For whenever I look at you
for a moment, then nothing comes to me to say, but my
tongue is frozen in silence, straightway a subtle flame has
run under my skin, I see nothing with my eyes, and my ears
are Sweat down over me, and
buzzing. pours trembling
seizes me all over, and paler than grass am I, and a little
short of death I seem inmy distraught wits.24
a kind of super-retina to
Sappho's senses perform here as
register what she sees: the sexy closeness of the man and the girl
(ttXAglov, "near to you,") who talks to him and holds his attention.
 Robert Bagg 65
That scene, which emphasizes the melting behavior of the girl in
the t?te-?-t?te, disrupts the normal operation of her bodily organs.
What was the disruption trying to tell Sappho, and through her,
us, her readers?
Instead of falling into a catalogue of daydream images which
will counter her suffering, Sappho dwells on sensations which
contribute to her exacerbation. What is nearer to a
happens night
mare. And a nightmare results, if I may risk but not press an
analogy to psychoanalysis, from the invasion of the soothing,
dream-producing mind in sleep by disquieting anxieties which
remain censored. I would that a sudden un
usually suggest
conscious informs account of her stunned senses,
anxiety Sappho's
that this anxiety is too deep-rooted and potent to be easily dis
guised or dispelled. In fact, it is this dissolution, this impossibility
of a saving physical or imaginative action which the poem con
fronts us with. We might attribute this impossibility to the girl's
never
unavailability?Sappho speaks as though she herself will
bask as the man does in her intimate But there
presence. perhaps
ismore to it than that. A few pages back I quoted Freud at length
on the transformation of sexual tension from felt as a
something
pleasure into something felt as excruciatingly painful, when ful
fillment is denied altogether. This may help us understand what
is happening to Sappho. Sexual tension becomes pleasant only
because it is colored by a rising hope of fulfillment, and even in
frustration of this hope we will sometimes still acknowledge the
sweetness that has been lost; but in this poem we see no chance of
either fulfillment or sweet frustration. Sappho did not say what
caused the harshness and was not concerned
striking apparently
to know; she is obsessed with in numb wonder an
only reliving
unexpected physical response to the couple's happiness, the girl's
person. It is difficult to accept the pounding heart, the flame
beneath the skin and the sweat as sweet or
coursing enlivening
sensations since they stun her, filling her with a close glimpse of
death. She ends choked, blanched and far from desire.
The meaning and force of this physical seizure must be found
in the dramatic contrast itmakes with the lively, easy scene before
her. Sappho was here face to face with normal, healthy love
between man and this too adds to the
woman?perhaps savage
was
jealousy she feels. Her living nightmare jealousy of normal
and easy love itself. It is more intense than a jealousy of desire
which could be satisfied by replacing the man she calls fortunate
at the girl's elbow; that would be a directed jealousy and whatever
Sappho feels is turned in, scourging herself. The fact that Sappho
begins her disintegration by looking at the girl she speaks to does
not determine that the girl alone causes the response; if that were
so, and the man exerted no influence on the scene, then we would

expect Sappho's feelings to be free of such bitterness. Sappho

cannot look at the girl without feeling the pressure of the man.
She salutes with no irony his divine good fortune, which extends
66 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

beyond the luck of the moment and includes his masculinity as

well. This is not another female rival she can confound with bitchy
sarcasm. response must be to the scene's unshakeable
Sappho's
meaning, rather than an urge to
upset this
meaning.
She would identify with the man but gives no sign she hates
him for his triumph. We ought to remind ourselves, at this point,
that Sappho is after all a woman, who bore a child and at least
once had the desires normal to her sex. There is a hint she suffers
a poignant,
fleeting and humiliating identification with the girl
also, in the montage of lines 3-5 against lines 7-9: the girl
to her voice and in the man's presence
manages enjoy laughter
while Sappho finds hers possess no such fluency. There is no role
in the pleasant mime before her into which Sappho can slip.
She is outside looking in and this sense of exile, sexual exile, is
rendered the trauma, the the sweat, the
by choking, impasse
which will not let her function and five. As a woman, Sappho
could never find herself quite as fortunate as the godlike man
she could never satisfy the girl's evident desire for virile, attentive
masculinity. This anxiety wells into her tortured inventory and
contributes to that extravagance we find baffling. That her lesbian
erotic temperament blocks her from feeling she is either a com
wholehearted man or woman, is a truth the
plete, whispering pan
so delicately present in the early lines brought home to her.
In L. P. 16 Sappho argues that a person's sense of the
"beautiful" must be unique because it springs from his private
erotic nature. Aesthetic in other words, is not determined
pleasure,
by acquiescence to a consensus but depends on the love felt for
another person or thing. Her difficulties in making us believe this
intuition are these: there are many kinds of beauty which ap
parently are unrelated to sex?that of military aggregations, for
instance. How can insist that desire alone determines our
Sappho
aesthetic pleasure in these rugged things? How can she dramatize
the power the person or thing beloved has to defeat the world's
answer the last question first, or begin
impersonal judgment? To
to answer it, Sappho charges the poem's atmosphere with military
seems to absorb in con
splendor and power, which the beloved
these She uses men under arms as of
quering troops. examples
so she may hint that every
accepted aesthetic excellence also
a future and a symbolic meaning, which
striking thing has both
both cause in us a sexual appreciation. And she asserts, in her
own and on her own that, the world's
person authority against
taste, she finds her KdXXo<sin Anactoria, whom she loves.

v arporov, ol Si rrioSaiv,
o]l ?liv hnrq
ol Si vdwv <f>a?G*
irr\?] y?v p.iXai\y\av
VaL K?AXtOTOV, OT
?]pfL ?y<? Si K7?V
TO) t?s cparat.
 Robert Bagg 67

ird]yxv 8' evp,ap ? avverov rrorjaai

ir\dvTi t[o]vt9, ? y?p iroXv wepaKedoioa
koXXos [dvdlpamaw *EX4va[ro]v dvSpa
tov
\Travdp]iOTOV

KaXX\iiTOi\a* i?a V Tpolav TrAeotfou

KO)vS[i ovSi </>?X?)V
7ra]?So? to[k\t?o)V
TTa^pmav] ipvaoOrj, aXX? irapdyay' avrav
avTiK
lSoC\aav

KvTTp?S' evKJapjrTov y?/>[

. . . , . . v
] K0V<j)Q)ST or? .
. vvv
.]/i ?vaKTopi\as ojvcftvat
a* ou] irap olaast

Ta\s (k)c ?oXXoipLav cparov tc ?ap.a

Kap.dpvxP'O. Xdpmpov tSrjv irpocrdma)

^ r? AvSwv apeara kov ottXoioi

TrcaSo/x] dx^vra?.

Some say that a host of horsemen is the fairest (or most

on the black earth, others of footsoldiers, but
thrilling) thing
I say that it is what one loves. It is very easy to make this
understood by everyone. For she, who surpassed all human
beings in beauty, Helen, left her most noble husband and
went sailing to Troy with not a thought for her daughter or
her dear parents. But the Cyprian led her astray at the first
. . . and ... as (?) now it
glance; for easily swayed lightly
has reminded me of Anactoria who is away. I would rather
see her lovely gait and the bright sparkle of her face than the
chariots of the Lydians and men in arms fighting on foot.25

Before plunging into the poem we ought to make sure we

understand as as be what the word KdXXvoTov
accurately may
meant to her. To us the word some woman or
probably suggests
landscape or work
of art, something in peaceful ripeness which
we may contemplate aesthetically and translate "most beautiful."
On the evidence of the context Sappho imagines for this word in
her poems, I would suggest that our aesthetic and peaceful con
notations surrounding the word are modern and mistaken. We
must be alert to cruder and more vital meanings which were
plainly operating in the word as Sappho's contemporaries heard
it, but which have vanished, us a cleansed and airy
leaving
formula. In an analogous context Kenneth Burke has described
this historical trap:

In brief, a summarizing term like "honor" might be much

more "illusory" and "mystifying" to us, in the abstract and
"spiritual" form it has for us, than it was for those who used
it as a counter in their everyday life, and so found plenty of
68 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

cause to discount it. The term, which looks absolute and

very
unconditional to us, was but the title for all the conditions.
In this sense, even the most of terms can be
theological
implicitly modified by very accurate nontheological meanings
which, though they may not show through the expression
itself, were clearly felt by the persons using it.26

Taking Burke's advice, we ought to assess the conditions at

work to modify the word away from our bland and abstract sense
of it. Judging from her imagery of war and the active situations
she presents, it seems to me that since what Sappho speaks of as
KdXXiGTov is awesome, full of and a more
always energy rousing,
accurate translation than beautiful would be thrilling or sensa
tional.

Sappho's preference might be taken as simple and humble?

Anactoria's lovely step and lightning smile please her more than
awesome military might. But by putting her choice in the shadow
of both Helen of Troy and armies on the march Sappho invites us
to see an underlying resemblance between these and her love for
Anactoria. She certainly didn't bring Helen and chariots and black
earth into the poem merely to triumph over them. Nor can the
resemblance she sees be superficial and visual only, as Page
suggests: "It looks as though Sappho observed that what capti
vates the of an of or or of a
spectator army cavalry infantry,
fleet under sail, is their movement, the grace of orderly and

rhythmic procession, and their ap?pvxp<a, the sparkle and flash of

innumerable or chariots, or sails, as what she sees
spears though
in the beauty of the individual is so far truly comparable with
what she and others see in the beauty of a great military dis
(I am reminded of W. H. Auden's sarcastic tribute to
play."27
battleships of the American Fleet riding in the Bay of Naples:
"worth every cent of the millions must have cost,"28 because
they
of their structural splendor, not their firepower.) What Page
neglects is, bluntly, the firepower of Sappho's troops. When we
look at armed men in battle array, a great deal of our excitement
comes from sensing the destruction and
slaughter which awaits
them, and their enemies. (There was every reason to believe that
Sappho has inmind armies gathered for war, since there was little
peace in Asia Minor during the Lyric Age. ) In the last words of
her poem, tightening Anactoria's likeness to mustering men by
her on the march, are "fighting
showing Sappho says the hoplites
on foot." The purpose of the insistent of chariots and
wheeling
hoplites seems to be to transfer some of their foreterror to
Anactoria: there is something that can kill as well as dazzle in the
beauty of a girl; we know this also from the last lines we have of
L. P. 31, where Sappho feels death coming on as she looks at a
girl no less attractive. Sappho's use of Helen tomake easily under
stood what she is for 6tt?> t?c "whatever you
claiming iparai
 Robert Bagg 69

love," makes certain it is not only the beauty but the power of the
loved person she is celebrating. Helen centers in herself the glitter
of and the of destruction hinted at in 7T o-8o/?] axeras,
beauty surge
"fighting on foot," and brings closer to the surface the implicit
between and sexual Since
comparison military splendor. Sappho's
listeners, then as now, do not need to be reminded of Helen's

responsibility for the Greek and Trojan dead, Sappho can fasten
her backward with ironic understatement on what Helen
gaze
was caused to leave?husband, children, her
parents?by "light
as Bowra
ness," Kov<j>o)<s, and her
"susceptibility," evKapurrov, to,
emends, Kv7rpt?. The logical ambiguity created by calling Helen
the "most beautiful" mortal at the moment when Sappho wants
her to illustrate the point that what one desires, what Helen found
KaXXiGTov, "most is than other claim on
thrilling," stronger any
mankind, emphasizes the destructiveness of the loved one as well
as the
headstrong behavior of love itself. It isHelen the lover, not
Paris the loved one, who reminds Sappho of Anactoria, who is not
here. the was made more some such
(Perhaps comparison apt by
event as Anactoria's or The
elopement marriage.) implication
which Helen's appearance throws into Anactoria's and flash
step
ing face is that the future of such glitter ismurderous destruction,
literal, as in Helen's time, or a feared death of the heart, Sappho's
heart. Anactoria is, after all, gone.
An expense of spirit is immensely difficult to put securely into
the words of a poem. In this poem Sappho has little more than
the thrust of her first person assertion to carry her conviction:
convictions, also, are less forceful and than
living experiences.
Spirit's expense ismuted by the nature of the tenses she finds her
self using. In the first stanza, both her own opinion and those she
are statements which do not take in actual histori
opposes place
cal time; only the tense in which Sappho gives her opinion
touches the When she commits her own to
present. feelings
from maxim into existence with the line, "I would rather
escape
see her lovely footfall,"
T?t]c K ?oXXoip,av epar?v
re ?ap.a,
she still thinks in the conditional tense. She stops on the doorstep
of reality. However, ?apa does have the soft firm sound of two
real "footfalls." But the very conditional nature of the poem sets
afoot in the reader a longing for Sappho to break loose from
a
theory and enter history, longing also to feel the weight of her
personality, I think we do in the line just quoted and in the whole
last stanza. This "weight" or historical action of Sappho's person
ality is distinct from the operation of her sensibility which estab
lished the charged atmosphere of the poem?the weight contains
her expended spirit.
A cannot suffer or exult in the real world. If a poet
persona
wishes to avoid that he is animating a
any suggestion persona,
rather than himself, he must find literary means. A poet can feel
70 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

a created character, fearing ahead, taking its hap

along with
piness on his own emotions; he can even do this for an iUumined
version of himself. But what he cannot do is truly believe that the
"I" inside which he writes will suffer or has suffered in his life
things which he has not felt or does not fear. The crucial question
is whether this belief or lack of belief influences the tone and
intensity of the poem. I believe we can, much of the time, sense
the degree of the poet's involvement in his persona. If we are
sometimes we can discover elements in the which
lucky, poem
put logic on the side of intuition. One characteristic of a dramatic
is that its creator retains a and
persona always viewpoint superior,
that the final meaning of the drama is to be found in this view
a persona which affords no such exit,
point. When we encounter
which has no poet showing outside him, then we begin to take
the persona with a seriousness which dissolves his fictive fa?ade.
comes before us in this way in a poem which has only one
Sappho
other character, Aphrodite.

TToiKiX?Bpov*d9avdT?j>p6SiTa9
7ra?A los SoX?7tXok , X?ooopLa?G ,
aerator
psf) fi firjS* oVtatat Sdpva,
TTOTVia, 6v[iov

?AAa tvlS9 iXd*, a? ttoto. Kar?pojTa

Tas efxas avSas dloioa TrqXot
?kXv S, rrrarpos Si 8??jlov XLttoigo,
Xpvoiov f?X0 S.

?pp? viraoSevCaiGa* /caAot Si g* S.yov

&K S GTpovdot, 7T
pl yds [xcXatvas
TTVKVa S?VV VT S TTT p Off'
WpdvOj?Q?
pos St? ?i4ggo}'

a?ifta 8* ?CCkovto*ov 8*, <S/xa/catpa,

/X l8lat<7(uc^, ?OavaTOJi irpOG?rrmi
*
OTTl 7T 7T0vda> KO>7Tt
7?p St)$T
Stjvt /caA^ft/u,
kwtti [toi O?Xoj yiveoOai
/zaAtora
Tiva 7T t0a>
/zatv?Aat, dvpLOjt,* Srjire
S gov tls cp , co
axfs jGayrjv yiAoTara;
Wdirfi, dSifcq?c;
nal y?p al <f>evyei,Tax?cos Stc?fci,
at Si S pa ?mt)S?kgt, aXX? Sc?crci.
at Se [XT] t,
(f)?Xei, T?nicos <f)iXr?G
KWVK id?Xoioa.
 Robert Bagg 71

iXde ?xoLKa? vvv, ^aAeVav Si Xvoov

K pL ocrera S? [loi reAecrcrai
p?p,vav,
ov 8' aura
6vp,os ?pb?ppe?, TeXeoov
crJ/x/xa^o? ?ggo.

Immortal Aphrodite, of the patterned throne, daughter of

Zeus, weaver of wiles, I beseech subdue not heart,
you, my
lady, with pangs or sorrows, but come hither, if ever before
at other times you heard my voice from afar and hearkened
to it, and left your father's house and came,
yoking your
golden chariot. Beautiful swift sparrows brought you, flutter
ing their multitudinous wings, over the black earth from the
sky through the middle air, and swiftly they came. And you,
Blessed One, with a smile on your immortal face, asked what
again is the matter with me, and why again I call, and what
most of all in my frenzied heart I wish to happen: 'Whom
now am I to persuade to come (?) into your
friendship?
Who wrongs you, Sappho? Even if she flees, soon shall she
pursue; if she receives not gifts, yet shall she give, and if she
loves not, soon shall she love, even though she would not/
Come to me now also, and deliver me from harsh cares, and
all that my heart longs to accomplish, accomplish it, and be
yourself my fellow-fighter.29
This ode is too often read and explored as tout court Sappho's
prayer to Aphrodite to visit her, ease her pain, and presumably
awaken in a reluctant girl the love Sappho ardently needs. We
tend to aim our keen interest in the same direction as Sappho
does, towards the moment when her will be redeemed, as
prayer
the goddess steps out of her chariot. Does Sappho seriously expect
what she asks? Or are we to on the true nature
pleased speculate
?a hallucination, a dream, a fiction??of earlier
poetic Sappho's
encounter with Aphrodite which the poem recreates? In either
case our attention wanders outside of the control and into
poem's
of fascination where we are certain to
regions great go wrong,
since it is impossible to recover the feelings (which are conven
tions and conditioned responses) which allow her belief. Bowra
and Page, for instance, both record similar appearances of gods to
the Greeks, neither attempting to judge these occasions or plumb
the psychological importance the epiphany has in Sappho's ode.
Bowra writes:

The appearance of Aphrodite must be treated as a genuine

experience, even if it is hardly possible to translate it into
modern terms. There is no hint that it is a dream, and in
deed it can hardly be one; for it comes in answer to a prayer
which Sappho made in her conscious waking hours. It is cer
. . . Such an
tainly more like a vision experience is by no
72 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

means impossible for a woman who believed implicitly in the

existence of Aphrodite and passed hours of imaginative com
munion with her. The poem shows that Sappho thought her
self to be specially favored ... It is never easy to get to the
heart of but we have no reason to as
religious experience,
sume that the Greeks did not sincerely believe themselves to
be visited at times in visible presence by gods.30

Bowra faces the problem sensibly enough, but he doesn't hide the
fact that we are at a loss as to how to take
nearly complete
Aphrodite, or know how Sappho did. I think we will have more
luck if we take Aphrodite as a character created by Sappho in a
poem. The difficulty with Bowra's natural and historical approach
is that it passes responsibility for the prayer's success to a goddess
towards whose charm and adventure we are well
every disposed
her literal in the world, even on Lesbos in
except presence Sap
time. Because of our the poem cannot
pho's apostasy, help acquir
ing the forlorn futility of an unanswered prayer. We don't trust
Aphrodite. I find myself arguing that her prayer is answered, no
matter what happened after its last line.
Our taking the poem literally, and therefore disbelieving it,
actually prevents us from conceiving how the poem itself may
satisfy Sappho's desire. We can start to examine this possibility by
remembering that though prayers are not self-fulfilling they do
comfort in the moment of saying them the anxieties that make
people put all their hopes on tomorrow; otherwise prayers would
have been martyred by the same disease that killed the personal
deities. occurs in this poem, and it occurs for us who
Something
are terrible atheists and who can't even believe in bene
utterly
ficent which transforms from a woman threat
goddesses, Sappho
ended by loss and aching desire to a woman confident, enjoying
warm hopes. Even though Aphrodite's intervention to help Sap
we feel
pho in her present crisis does not take place in the poem,
that the goddess has in fact changed Sappho's temper by poem's
end. Though she is still calling to Aphrodite in the last stanza
as in the first, the urgency is quieted from the pathetic juxtaposi
tion of the divine and the mortal?7t6tvui9 6v?iov, "Queen, heart,"
to oacra Se fxoi reAeo-crat/ re'Acow, All that my heart
Ovfios tfiippa,
wishes to accomplish, bring to pass," and the awaiting of Aphro
dite as almost an and an when she avfjLfjLaxos eWo,
equal ally, says
"be my fellow-fighter."
During the intervening fines, what has taken place for both
and ourselves is that vivid rec
Sappho Aphrodite's appearance?a
ollection and no more, a traditional of
though necessary part
such invocations?has achieved the same sense of well
psychic
being which her future and real epiphany would achieve. Though
use in present troubles,
logically a past event and therefore of no
the existence of Aphrodite speaking softly to Sappho at the end of
 Robert Bagg 73

her glittering descent is full of balm and promise. Sappho has had
the experience she craved; if her friends heard the poem, so will
they have felt the genius of this goddess who doesn't even need
to exist to weave charms.
follow the poem's development keeping a close eye on
If we
a daydreaming
grammatical connection, on her habitual use of
interlude, and on her way of letting another voice modu
person's
late out of her own which we saw in L. 94, we
P. can see how
the action of the poem has a sure technical
extraordinary symbolic
hand for a sorcerer's apprentice.
Her first concern is to
impress upon us, and herself, that her

anguish is real and can only be helped by a goddess. (Without

this the poem would have no serious would
reality purpose?there
be nothing for Aphrodite to accomplish. To assume that, au fond,
Sappho's intent is playful, as Page does,31 ignores the tactful
of the first stanza and that aa-atai, and ?vtauri,
pathos "pangs,"
"sorrows," have to be found in nerves as well as in lexi
meanings
cons.) She does this, as I have said earlier, by the weighted end
of the first stanza which excludes all but her heart and her god
dess. She does not immediately equate relief with the lifting of
these pains; she equates itwith the coming to her of the goddess:
with and sorrows crush heart, come
"Don't, pangs my queen?but
here." She blames the pain directly on her, so that any other
means of sparing her except Aphrodite's action is beyond thought.
The force of this equation is tomake the appearance of Aphrodite
the happening which will give comfort rather than the dissolving
of her anguish or the sudden softness of the girl who (we would
say) is causing all the trouble. Dramatically, the whole of Sap
pho's problem is focused on the epiphany in the poem.
With our eyes accompanying the sparrows ferrying Aphrodite
down to the black earth we no longer puzzle over Sappho's prob
lem or feel our sympathy exposed?already this flamboyant ma
neuver liberates us, as similar have done on other
descriptions
occasions, by a daydream which prepares us for less inhibited
kinds of perception. Flying over guttering space must suggest
leaving behind troubles, inhibitions, people. When she lands,
"blessed" because she can bless. That
Aphrodite smiles, ?xOKaipa,
smile does what smiles of sympathy always do. It places the re
sources of hope and energetic love and haven the smiler owns
in troubled hands, and the smile is purer at that instant because
its resources have not yet been tapped. At first Sappho quotes her
into her own
indirectly, then Aphrodite breaks without warning
direct voice, as if she were inside Sappho, like Socrates' daimon,
or welling from the sea or somebody's imagination. Sappho has
created Aphrodite barraging her with questions, like a girlfriend
so swiftly that we may miss one of the
long on another island,
reasons why Aphrodite is so comforting. She knows what iswrong
with Sappho without being told. She knows what Sappho wants.
 74 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

The seams between present and past desires and prayers vanish,
and when this happens Aphrodite-remembered is as effective as
Aphrodite-yet-to-arrive. The thrice , serves
repeated St)vt "again,"
to all tenses into this one occasion. The breathless
gather intimacy
of the conversation, the pure concern of goddess for mortal, is the
comforting gesture. And it must have been a magnificently dar
one.
ing
What Aphrodite promises is a complete reversal of fortune,
ai Se ?ir) (ft?kei, ra^eco?
<?>i\r}o-ei
KO)VK 0e?otcra,

but since what is most deeply felt is Aphrodite's part in accom

plishing it, the effect of her words is to make us think that the
girl has suffered her change of heart as Aphrodite speaks, in her
words. Our awareness that her words did come true once rein
forces this impression.
has used an event in a poem as an event in her a
Sappho life,
reversal of the usual economy of autobiographical poetry.
The last stanza, a concession to some would
reality, though say
it repeats the first stanza and returns to its
importuning mood,
falls on changed ears and is spoken by a changed voice. Aphro
dite's presence has just been felt, and warms the
concluding fines
with the power to accomplish what they ask, and this presence
ensures that
Sappho's call to Aphrodite to fight alongside her is
satisfyingly spoken. The poem satisfies all the troubles which
called it into being. The troubles were personal and they were
calmed by a personal way of exposing them to her genius for
poetry. In her case the genius for writing cannot be separated
from the genius for tending to such troubles.
Until now we have examined Sappho's lyrics as healing enter
prises, linguistic attempts to spirit the mind suffering from desire
or into a more or aware
separation away, satisfactory pleasurable
ness, the medicinal of daydream, mem
drawing upon properties
ory, sensuality, Aphrodite and metaphor to accomplish this. I now
wish to risk a look at both the suffering and the daydreaming from
the perspective of two psycho-analytic writers who have offered
remarkable theories concerning the psychic value of poetry. Using
these theories I hope to arrive at plausible, if not wholly prove
able, explanations of powerful impressions most critics would find
in Sappho's poems. The impressions are: an intensity of sweat,
touch, pain, an extraordinary intimacy of tone, the voice carrying
no more than a few feet, a distinct sense that the lives caught up
in the poems are lived under a pressure which did not plague her
townsmen. Alcaeus, on Lesbos in the same
writing generation,
shows nothing of this intensity. My suggestion is that these im
reflect a consequence of lesbian milieu
pressions may Sappho's
?that her erotic caused her an anxious uncer
perversion perhaps
tainty in her sexual life which we call guilt. The anxiety and guilt
 Robert Bagg 75

would be stirred in Sappho and her group by knowing that the

desires and practices they followed were not those followed by
the rest of their society. (Our only evidence, however, is as fol
lows: from the tortured qualities of the poems we infer guilt and
from guilt we infer something about the society.)
To invoke Aphrodite to preside over female homosexual love
may perhaps seem a little surprising, since the is above
goddess
all the diety of sexual intercourse between man and woman and
of the fruitfulness which filled orchards with apples and wombs
with children.32 But Sappho apparently felt no difficulty about
this. The possibility that passion for what one loves will betray
family and marriage Sappho accepts gladly in L. P. 16 where the
eloping Helen is her revered example of the destructive, inescap
able libido in action. (Sappho's countryman, Alcaeus, by contrast
delivers the harsh judgment of Helen in L. P. B. 10 that was
usual in post-Homeric times.) It seems likely that Helen, as one
who loved spectacularly counter to the wishes of her society,
embodied for Sappho the guilt and the thrill of her own anal
ogous gesture. An enclave or coterie of girls clustered about
an intense erotic life for awhile, then eventu
Sappho, who lived
ally departed, one by one, to marriage or their families, presents
a picture of isolation which may have taken its tithes of anxiety.
If we are disposed to admit the possibility that guilt was a fac
tor in Sappho's life, the question becomes, where do we look for
its spoor in her poetry?
Guilt finds itsway to the conscious mind in the guise of unpleas
ant sensations; these be drawn from many sources of human
may
frustration, but they always retain a connection to the guilt they
Their function is to create a tension, of
disguise.33 psychological
which the sweetness of partaking of the guilt is the other crucial
component. The basic vehicle for Sappho's guilt, if my hypothe
sis is correct, would be the continual deprivation and separation
she undergoes, since these forms of suffering remind her that she
ought to deprive herself of girls, that separation is the toll society
ex
finally takes of her felicity, and that her pain is the penalty
acted for pursuing her own will and loving against the rules. She
appeals in her poems from the world to her goddess and her art,
and it is only through the magic of Aphrodite and poetry that
a release from
Sappho can both acknowledge her guilt and find
it. In the epiphany or the memory of sensual pleasure her pres
ent amorous suffering and the guilt which has gathered around
the suffering may be, temporarily, subdued. That poems are able
to bring such unconscious thought to expression has perhaps long
been implicit in the awe surrounding poets. Dream and daydream
Freud has demonstrated, are the habitual means by which the
normal person tastes his unconscious desires. One of Freud's orig
inal students, Hanns Sachs, in his essay "The Community of Day
dreams,"34 has proposed that the true psychological nature of the
76 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHo's LYRICS

poem is a mutual daydream. Young people, especially children

very intimate with each other, Sachs reports from his clinical
sometimes create themselves to
experience, daydreams, secluding
out and revel in them. These mutual be
spin daydreams may
sweet or a or adventurous terror. Two
may produce pleasurable
sisters, for instance, themselves to escape intro
imagined trying
duction to three young men who desperately wished to meet
them; always, in the daydream, the boys triumphed. In reality,
however, another young man with whom both girls were in love
had successfully managed to prevent precisely this introduction.
Sachs explains the peculiar pleasure in outwitting the jealous, but
loved boy as a means of punishing that chap for not declaring
himself for one sister. The sisters' was based on the in
intimacy
secure love shared, and when the chose the older sister,
they boy
the mutual daydreams broke off. Each daydream Sachs investi
gated hid some harsh fact which analysis later exposed, and each
the sharers a sensation from what seemed
daydream gave pleasant
logically to be an unpleasant thought. (Why did the sisters dwell
on a situation which would discomfort their elected lover?) Ac
to Sachs' "such can be
cording experience, daydreams produced
only when two individuals are for a time brought together by a
strong, suppressed, preferably unconscious wish they have in
common."35 These conditions for the practice of mutual
daydream
came
together among Sappho and her company. Friendship was
intense, and they had gathered to explore ways of feeling the rest
of the Greek world regarded with suspicion. If we follow Sachs'
reason for the fascination of mutual its relevance to
daydream,
becomes even clearer: with the Uncon
Sappho's poetry "Toying
scious means the of condemned and this
enjoyment pleasures,
cannot fail to stir up a feeling of guilt, especially if the Oedipus
was the cause of the There are, however,
complex transgression.
ways and means to mitigate this guilt-feeling or eventually to
avoid it altogether."36 The marriage most of the girls disappeared
into must have completely altered and possibly stilled their need
for the kind of mitigation of guilt which Sappho's poems pro
vided. Sachs continues:

The of the mutual . . . consists in

advantage daydream
a collaborator who,
having found by his readiness to share
one's daydream, demonstrates that he too is in the same
psychic situation, driven by the same urges, and threatened
. . What
.
by the same guilt feeling neither would have done
for himself, each does for both. This getting rid of the isola
tion means a great alleviation of their guilt feeling. To be the
sinner, excluded from the community, is unbearable,
only
when the sin is an unconscious wish, so that the
especially
daydreamer does not know what sin he has committed and
cannot defend himself against the indictment . . .The un
 Robert Bagg 77

conscious, as we know, is asocial. But out of the need of

reacting to it, of handling it, of giving it a legitimate outlet,

we see emerge here the formation of the smallest social unit
of two. 'Your wishes are wishes,
?community my your guilt
is my guilt'?as long as this lasts the two are sworn friends
and brothers.37

Sachs advances from these clinical observations to propose

that poems fulfill the same needs, for the poet and his audience,
as mutual daydreams do for guilt-sharing pairs of children and
adolescents: "If the poet's word is liked and accepted, if it arouses
in the audience the identical emotions which made him utter it,
then his fantasy has become the daydream of every individual?
a mutual' with an unlimited number of
daydream partners."38
This audience, Sachs is to
responsive emphasizes, indispensable
the poet since it provides the "acclaim and appreciation" which
are "proof that his work had succeeded in
making his brothers
in-guilt and passion confess by their emotional response what
could not be told in any other way."39 If either poet or audience
ceases to be aware of the other the
possibilities for sharing and
so assuaging guilt would vanish. (Sappho keeps a firm grip on at
least one member of her audience by naming and speaking
directly to a friend or to Aphrodite.) This process of sharing
confirms my belief that a poem's career in the world is alive and
dramatic; itwill do no longer to treat a poem as T. S. Eliot does,
for instance, as no vital of a creator's
though part personality
survived to fill out its skin of sound. For any "impersonal" theory,
the of an audience's far
consequences participation, exceeding
the reserve or detachment we sometimes have believed was its
are immense and An intuitive
prerogative, obviously devastating.
awareness of the most secret of the his
energy poet's personality,
guilt, is indispensable to the poem's healing acceptance.
Simon Lesser has that our emotions are taken in hand,
argued
with our consent, fiction, and "that neither catharsis nor the
by
aesthetic can be on the
experience explained except assumption
that we become actively involved in the fiction which moves us."40
The action the poet performs is his great two-edged gift to his
audience:

fiction, we see, is not a innocent

Reading completely exper
ience. As Kenneth Burke declares: "A tragedy is not pro
found unless the poet imagines the crime?and in thus
imagining it, he symbolically commits it. Similarly, in so far
as the audience participates in the imaginings, it also par
in the offense." ... No less than our own
ticipates psychic
us to deal with the
productions the reading of fiction permits
events our our
past of fives and hopes and fears for the
future?and to deal with them trouble
actively, re-enacting
some until the or other emotion
experiences pain they
 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHo's LYRICS
yS

aroused has been assimilated; acting out, with such intensity

that affects are discharged and tensions relieved, experiences
which to our wishes and dreams.41
give shape

Sachs' proposal that all poetry ismutual daydream, which per

haps is true in his inclusive Freudian scheme, should not distract
us from the especially exact sense in which Sappho's fiercely
intimate circle and poetry practice mutual daydream. Audience
and were as close as adolescents; a
poet whispering purposeful
daydreaming drift away from reality is habitual; and most im
a
portant, we can be reasonably sure the girls held in common
specific kind of guilt.
The Unconscious may be universal, as Sachs says, but the tones
and forms guilt assumes are diverse, eccentric and individual so
that each must "share" and benefit from the poet's dream accord
ing to how strongly it touches his guilt. We may all be ultimately
involved in the Oedipus complex, but few of us are thoroughly
lesbian or homosexual; nevertheless, few are immune to a curi

osity and thus an impulse towards homosexual

about feeling.
a
Sappho's poems provide us graceful chance to acknowledge and
our guilt but still exposed
indulge this feeling; spared the brunt of
to our forbidden longing, blessed for once by an undying smile.

FOOTNOTES
1William to Lyrical Ballads" Roman
Wordsworth, "Preface English
tic Poetry and Prose, ed. Russell Noyes (New York, 1956), p. 358.
2A Grammar and a Rhetoric
of Motives of Motives (New York,
1962), pp. xvii,3ff.
3Ancient authorities date her creative life towards the close of the
seventh B.C., two generations or so after Archilochus.
century Except
for a brief political exile to Sicily she lived her life in Mytilene, the
royal city of Lesbos. She was married; had a brother, otherwise beloved,
whom she reproves for squandering his patrimony on a courtesan from
Alexandria; and a Cleis to whom she writes twice in verse with
daughter
affectionate firmness. Her family seems to have been rich and important.
She is said to have been dark and of short stature. See C. M. Bowra,
Greek Lyric Poetry (Oxford, 1961 ) and Denys Page, Sappho and Al
caeus hereafter referred to, respectively, as GLP and
(Oxford, 1959),
S and A.
4 If some has distorted
been to connect it to
poetry by overeagerness
alarums in its creator's life, other poetry, such as Sappho's, has been
muted an facile reluctance to it according to
by equally study unlovely
which the poet's life put upon it. Many scholars refuse to be
pressures
lieve Sappho when she says in fragment 1 (Lobel and Page: see note 6
below ) that she would make love to a young girl; others,
throw
physical
on the mercifully strict rules of evidence, exile her
ing themselves
meaning from the real to the problematical. If we believe her, the re
do not disturb her melody or richness; we grow more alert
percussions
to the purpose of her prayers and seizures, which is to transform anx
ious or anguished into a divine well-being, (continued next
feeling page)
 Robert Bagg 79

lesbianism, is as the goes, "unproven." We

Sappho's scholarly phrase
don't have or vases or
damning photographs black-figured contemporary
testimony from reliable witnesses that would stand up in court against
such stern defense as Sir Maurice Bowra and Wilamowitz
attorneys
Moellendorf. Nevertheless, belief that she was in fact lesbian is not
ridiculous, merely sensible. Most of the ancient world had no doubts
on the as
point. Ovid, who had all of her poetry before him, spoke of it
instruction in the art of Lesbian love. (Tristia, ii, 365, Lesbia quid
docuit nisi amare )
Sappho, paellas.
the evidence for her remains circumstantial, the
Although practice
evidence for her impulse towards lesbian love, and her fascination with
its peculiar excitement is strong and abundant:
1 ) Sexual of one was
longing girl for another the emotional climate
of her circle and is explicit in the following lines:
ir?dos T. [
afJufnTTOrarai
r?v KaXav ? y?p Karay yL? avra[v
7TT?aia>?Boiaav, eyw Se yaipu). . .

Desire floats about the set

lovely girl, for the gown
her fluttering when she saw it, and I rejoice.
(L.P. 22: tr. CM. Bowra)

Kai orpiofjLv[ave]m /tioA?ct/cav

. .
?ird\av ira. [ ] . wv
???r?siro6o\y veajvl&wv

... and on soft beds, ... satisfied

gentle you longing
... for young maidens ...
(L.P. 94)
2) In. L. P. 99, if the editors are correct, used the word
Sappho
an artificial (of leather or
oAio?oc, meaning phallus ivory perhaps)
which would indicate at least that she was aware of such perversions
and that they were not a
subject forbidden to her songs. That we have
one
only this piece of glaring, palpable lesbian fact, out of hundreds of
that Sappho's mind was on the exaltation of the
fragments, suggests
senses rather than on vulgar satisfaction; on the uses, that is,
spiritual
of sensuality. discusses the olisbos question in S and A,
Denys Page
p. 145.
3) The words uses to express her are borrowed from
Sappho passions
the poetry of heterosexual love. She in the man's role,
physical speaks
at least an aura of feminine tact and charm,
though always preserving
when or of her maidens. Catullus needed to make
addressing speaking
no substantial when he translated L. P. 31 into his passion for
changes
Lesbia.
4) She experiences the girls with never intel
impulsive sensuality,
and with few of the restraints would on
lectually, aoyc^poavvrj impose
the exercise of friendship uncharged by desire. All friendships within
the same sex somewhat of homosexual attraction; takes
partake Sappho
this attraction as the basis for
friendship.
5) Lesbian feeling
animates several other minor fragments, e.g.
8avois a7raA.a? trapas ?v (rrrjOemv "you may on the bosom of your
sleep
tender companion." (L. P. 126)
If we refuse to believe that she was aware of sexual
feelings towards
80 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

the girls she addressed, then we are arguing that her was un
impulse
conscious or It is much more were
suppressed. likely that these desires
conscious. In either case, it seems to me, the strong possibility
entirely
exists that Sappho sensed, or that her emotions went
actively intuitively,
the grain of what her age approved or women to
against encouraged
feel for each other. If this be so, then the further arises that
possibility
were written to assuage the uneasy or even feel
Sappho's poems guilty
ings that accompanied every moment of passion in her
group's erotic
life. Though interesting and of great this line of
perhaps importance,
reasoning is and I shall defer discussion of it until the end
speculative
of this paper, and then come at it with evidence from a different source.
5 S and
A, p. 133.
6 I have used the numbering system for
Sappho's fragments adopted
by Lobel and Page in Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (Oxford, 1955),
I have to base my on C. M. Bowra's
though usually preferred analyses
less austere texts, to be found in GLP.
7 I am
thinking of lines like L. P. 105(c), cf. Catullus 64, 38 ff, and
not of L. P. 31, in which, as most will now there is no
people agree,
evidence for a marriage ceremony.
8 Lesbos itself was famous for beauty contests. A verse fragment by
Alcaeus (L. P. 130 ) reads, "Where Lesbian girls
in trailing robes go up
and down, mar
being judged for their beauty, and about them rings the
vellous sound of holy women."
the worship of Aphrodite did often contain a tacit invitation
Perhaps
to lesbian eroticism, since the goddess' devotees, men and women alike,
were to dwell on her She is, says L. R.
regularly encouraged beauty.
Farnell, in Cults of the Greek States, Vol. II (Oxford, 1898), p. 666,
"not only the power that sends love, but is also herself the lover." If we
wish to see we must look at statues of her or at women. In
Aphrodite,
an Homeric to Aphrodite the goddess appears, in
early Hymn smiling,
a line echoes in her famous ode.
Sappho
vrj VLvOepiav acLaofxai re
Jiv7rpoy rj ?porolcn
/ACt?t^a 8<?pa SlSc?ctlv ?<f> ifiepe? Se 7r/ooo"<o7rto
atct
/xctSt?ct Kai e<?> l/xeprbv OeeL avOo?.
I will of Cyprus, who sweet gifts
sing of Cythera gives
to men, and who wears a smile ever upon her lovely face
and brings the flower of loveliness.
however, does not sing of in cult celebration, she asks Aph
Sappho,
rodite to come to her, as in L. P. 1, to appear, to herself so
embody
senses may touch her. The most direct fulfilment of this desire
Sappho's
was to and respond to the presence of another woman. For a
enjoy
then, a possible outcome of intense love for Aphrodite was les
female,
bianism.
9 "What his rival and
craftsmen, Prodicus, Gorgias, Thrasymachus
were to Socrates, that Gorgo and Andromeda were to Sap
Protagoras
who sometimes takes them to task and at other times refutes them
pho,
and dissembles with them like Socrates." Maximus of Tyre, quoted
just
in GLP, p. 178.
10 was less repressed in the ancient world than in our
Homosexuality
own it would be a mistake to say that the ancients had no
age, but
consummation of this love. The sacred band was a
prejudice against
famous and the most admired milieu where homosexual love
oddity,
was unashamed and cherished?the Socratic circle of Platonic love?
 Robert Bagg 81

for on non-fulfilment
its existence of these desires.
depended physical
For Plato, male homosexual love had as its ideal a rarified, non-physical,

exhilarating friendship which moved and was felt in a medium

intensely
of ideas. Philosophy was its natural Female homosexual love,
expression.
on the other hand, lived in a medium of shared and sensibil
sensuality
as shows us in her poems filled with rose chains on
ity, Sappho falling
soft necks, apple boughs full of sleep, moonlit meadows, bowls fun of
wine, bodies full of glowing desire or harsh deprivation. Its special poig
nance was that this love could not fertilize the womb, as it could
just
not discourse. Men witn the world of
engender philosophical identify
ideas, as Freud women don't; the most natural female com
argues;
munication is through some form of sensual awareness.
n
GLP, pp. 178-179.
12 "Transformation in The Basic Writ
Sigmund Freud, of Puberty"
ings of Sigmund Freud, ed. A. A. Brill (New York, 1938), pp. 605-606.
is L. P. 1, 96, 94,16.
14 11.188-206.
Hesiod,
Theogony,
15Richmond
i6
Lattimore, Greek Lyrics (Chicago, 1960), pp. 40-41.
GLP, p. 197.
17Translated
by Richmond Lattimore, The Iliad of Homer (Chicago,
1952), p. 75.
is 191.
GLP, p.
i?Mimesis
(Garden City, 1957), p. 5.
20
Bowra, however argues (GLP, p. 191, n. 2) that these words do
not prove that a sexual encounter is meant: "But woOos is not the same
as and the Homeric indicate after the
epos, though phrases satiety
appetites have been indulged, n?Oos indicates desire for some one ab
sent, and the notion is that even this is set aside." He may be right.
2i Greek 41-42.
Lyrics, pp.
22
Quoted inW. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeks and their Gods (London,
1950), p. 54.
23The
2*
Philosophy of Literary Form (New York, 1957), pp. 75-76.
GLP, p. 185.
25
GLP, p. 180.
26A Grammar a Rhetoric 63.
of Motives and of Motives, p.
*7Sand A, p. 57.
28 "Fleet Visit" in The Shield (New York, 1955), p. 39.
of Achilles
29 from Lobel, reads
GLP, p. 199. Bowra, borrowing K0)% K OiXava;
but this is not Greek.
so
GLP, p. 202.
si S and
A, pp. 12-18.
32Walter F. Otto, The Homeric tr. Moses Hadas
Gods, (New York,
1954), pp. 91-103.
33 Simon O. Fiction and the Unconscious
Cf., Lesser, (New York,
1962), pp. 27-28.
34Cf.
Sigmund Freud, "The Relation of the Poet to Daydreaming"
in On Creativity and the Unconscious (New York, 1958), pp. 44-54;
Hanns Sachs, The Creative Unconscious (Cambridge, Mass., 1952), pp.
11-60.
35
Sachs, p. 30.
se
Sachs, p. 35.
37
Sachs, pp. 36-37.
38
Sachs, p. 38.
82 LOVE, CEREMONY AND DAYDREAM IN SAPPHO'S LYRICS

39
Sachs, pp. 3S-39.
40
Lesser, p. 238.
4i
Lesser, p. 239.