The sensation of love, according to Sappho

I am on vacation with my girlfriend and her family and that's always a time for me to go very mushy and loving. We're both busy people and don't get to spend as much time together as we would like, but now we do and it's wonderful! So, today you are getting Sappho's thoughts on how love feels and you can see if you relate as much as I do. Have a lovely day, people. While you are reading this, chances are that I am packing up to go home or on a boat or in a car to do so. Thank you, Wiki people, for the help today. I have to pack.

Sappho 31 is an archaic Hellenic lyric poem written by Ancient Hellenic female poet Sappho of the island of Lesbos. This poem was in antiquity known as 'phainetai moi' (φαίνεταί μοι) after the opening words of its first line. The poem is a good representation of archaic lyric poetry, in that the persona and personal emotions of the poet are central to the poemʻs form; it is written in the first person singular, and the speaker is a woman in love with another woman, as in so many of Sapphoʻs poems. Some have seen it as a fragment from an epithalamion - a wedding poem, intended to be sung to the bride at the entrance to her nuptial chamber; it does not share any of the attributes of the classic form called enkomion--a poem of praise. It is perhaps Sappho's most famous poem.

Sappho 31 was one of the two substantially complete poems by Sappho to survive from ancient times, written in Sappho's vernacular form of Greek, the Lesbian-Aeolic dialect. Sappho's poems were designed to be sung, and use direct and emotional language, in this case about the longing of love. Sappho starts by praising the beauty of the bridegroom, likening him to a god, but then describes her jealousy and the physical manifestations of her distress upon seeing a young woman whom she loves with her new husband, the epiphany bringing her to a symbolic death.

Longinus's treatise 'On the Sublime' (Περὶ ὕψους, Perì hýpsous) selects the poem as an example of the sublime for the intensity of its passionate emotions. It was quoted in Plutarch's 'Dialogue on Love' (Έρωτικός, Erotikos) in his Moralia (a Latin translation of the original Greek title, Ἠθικά, Ethika, Ethics).

Sappho - Fragment 31

 

He appears to me, that one, equal to the gods,
the man who, facing you,
is seated and, up close, that sweet voice of yours
he listens to

 

And how you laugh your charming laugh. Why it
makes my heart flutter within my breast,
because the moment I look at you, right then, for me,
to make any sound at all won’t work any more.

 

My tongue has a breakdown and a delicate
— all of a sudden — fire rushes under my skin.
With my eyes I see not a thing, and there is a roar
that my ears make.

 

Sweat pours down me and a trembling
seizes all of me; paler than grass
am I, and a little short of death
do I appear to me.