"That man seems like the Gods to me..."

It's nearly Valentine's day, so why not share some lovely poetry from ancient times? And, of course, my throughts then go to Sappho. 

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).

“That man seems like the gods

To me—the one who sits facing

You and nearby listens as you

sweetly speak—

and he hears your lovely laugh—this then

makes the heart in my breast stutter,

when I glance even briefly, it is no longer possible

for me to speak—

but my tongue sticks in silence

and immediately a slender flame runs under my skin.

I cannot see with my eyes, I hear

A rush in my ears—

A cold sweat breaks over me, a tremble

Takes hold of me. Then paler than grass,

I think that I have died

Just a little.”

Fragment 31

[Translation form here]