if not winter fragments of sappho by sappho

Some scholars regard these depictions of separations as alluding to the transition from girlhood to womanhood and possibly from homoerotic relationships to conventional marriages. Several of Sappho's extant poems (notably fragments 94, 96, and 16) emphasize the pathos and longing in the departure of a young woman from Sappho and from a circle of women to which they all appear to be affiliated. Even in poems that do not deal explicitly with love, Sappho often depicts herself as part of a world in which the emotional and/or erotic bonds between women take center stage.

While the nature of Sappho's “circle” is still open to debate, contemporary scholars generally regard Sappho as connected in some way, formally or informally, to a group of women affiliated with one another through the bonds of friendship and love. We do know that Sappho wrote in the Aeolic dialect in a variety of meters and that her work covers a broad range of themes and concerns: romantic love, marriage, fellowship and community, myth and ritual, politics, and philosophical reflections on nobility and goodness.įor years, notions of Sappho as the head of a religious cult or as a teacher in a kind of finishing school for young aristocratic women dominated Sappho scholarship. At the very least, it seems likely that her wedding songs might have been performed by choruses. Unfortunately, there is not enough conclusive evidence to determine the context in which Sappho's songs were sung. But there is considerable disagreement among scholars about whether Sappho's poems were for solo or choral performance. Like other poetry of her day, Sappho's was composed primarily for oral performance. Much of the fascination about Sappho over the centuries has been fueled by the fact that she is a woman addressing many of her love poems to other women, that we know almost nothing about her life, and that, in modern times, her poems survive mostly in fragments. While two hundred fragments have been attributed to Sappho, only two complete poems and approximately forty fragments survive. Ancient sources state that she produced nine volumes of poetry. Born at the close of the seventh century BCE, Sappho was famously declared the “Tenth Muse” by Plato.

Sappho was a Greek lyric poet from Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Detail of Raphael’s Parnassus showing Sappho, 1509.(Wikimedia Commons)

If not winter fragments of sappho by sappho