Showing Off With Sapphics

My anniversary gift to the ladies of Woman-Stirred is Eloise Stonborough, an 18-year-old poet who lives in London. I met Eloise at Eratosphere, a place where I spend a lot of time lately, studying metrical poetry. Eloise's poem is in a metrical form called Sapphics. I asked Eloise if she'd like to educate us about Sapphics, and she wrote an essay for us. So without further ado, here is Eloise, first with her poem in Sapphics, then her essay on Sapphics. Eloise selected this painting, Sappho by Gustav Klimt.


Puck's Lament

Should I waste the delicate flesh of cattle
on my heathen tongue: that most lewd of organs,
most exalted limb? I would never sully
life with that crude kiss.

Rather I shall siphon the scent from your neck,
mark out quadrants, diamonds of skin, to lick whilst
you are dozing; murmuring through your dreams. So,
stir and I’ll damp your

lids with love-in-idleness; touch lips lightly
to your vellum cheek and inhale the incense
of your breath; confess my distress then disappear
before you wake.

~~~

The Original ‘Woman-Stirred’ Poet

Some say the Muses are nine: how careless!
Look, there's Sappho too, from Lesbos, the tenth.
---Plato

Sappho is undoubtedly a lesbian icon, the original ‘woman-stirred’ poet, but it seems to me to be doing her a great disservice to solely consider her as such. Sappho may have ensured a place for female homosexuality in the canon, but it is more remarkable that she herself should have been included as one of the nine canonical lyric poets, at a time when women were more property than people.

After two millennia of censorship all that remains of Sappho’s poetry are some fragments and one or two complete poems, but during her lifetime it is estimated that she wrote nine books of poetry. It is testament to her genius and influence that much of what we have of her writing today are extracts used in other texts to illustrate the correct use of grammar and meter.

This is where the breadth of Sappho’s accomplishments become obvious. She wasn’t merely an innovator in content (she is one of the first recorded poets to move away from the typical themes of the Gods to a more individualistic, lyric approach, focussing on human experience and emotion); she was also responsible for fine-tuning a style of lyric meter that is now — unsurprisingly — called Sapphic meter. For centuries poets attempted imitations of Greek meters, in their original sense as feet distinguished by syllable duration, but English is fundamentally a stress based tongue and therefore unsuited to this sort of prosody. The English ear struggles to hear any rhythmic quality in such lines, which is similar to the difficulty of hearing purely syllabic lines: we want to count stresses; syllable number and duration don’t register.

Due to the idiosyncrasies of our language we tend towards far simpler meters than the Greeks, who in some ways were far more advanced metrically, and I wanted to learn Sapphic meter in order to escape the all encompassing iamb. There is a view that to write anglicised Sapphic meter is an easy and inauthentic way of avoiding the true challenge of recreating Greek meter in English but, although the forms are different, I believe that they both have their own challenges and are capable of equal musicality.

For me, at least, I found that the greatest obstacle in writing this poem was to try and combine sense and meter. It was one thing to shoehorn a basically iambic piece into a predominantly trochaic rhythm and quite another to find a tone and style which suits the feel of Sapphics.

This seems to have been a problem which has faced many of those translating Sappho’s poetry, and this has led to some particularly abysmal editions, especially those that attempt to force her words into traditional English or Romantic forms such as the sonnet. There have also been those that have dispensed with form altogether, to prevent form-led distortions, and many of these translations are beautiful in their own way. Although I don’t speak Greek, I find the versions which structure her verse in anglicised Sapphics the most successful. During my research I found several versions of one of the few complete poems we have left, her ‘Hymn to Aphrodite’.

Compare:

Iridescent-throned Aphrodite, deathless
Child of Zeus, wile-weaver, I now implore you,
Don't--I beg you, Lady--with pains and torments
Crush down my spirit,

But before if ever you've heard my pleadings
Then return, as once when you left your father's
Golden house; you yoked to your shining car your
Wing-whirring sparrows;

Skimming down the paths of the sky's bright ether
On they brought you over the earth's black bosom,
Swiftly--then you stood with a sudden brilliance,
Goddess, before me;

(Extract taken from http://www.stoa.org/diotima/anthology/vandiver.shtml
© 1997, Elizabeth Vandiver)

With this:

O Venus, daughter of the mighty Jove,
Most knowing in the mystery of love,
Help me, oh help me, quickly send relief,
And suffer not my heart to break with grief.

If ever thou didst hear me when I prayed,
Come now, my goddess, to thy Sappho's aid.
Orisons used, such favour hast thou shewn,
From heaven's golden mansions called thee down.

See, see, she comes in her cerulean car,
Passing the middle regions of the air.
Mark how her nimble sparrows stretch the wing,
And with uncommon speed their Mistress bring.

(extract from Herbert’s ‘To the Goddess of Love’, 1713., taken from http://www.classicpersuasion.org/pw/sappho/sape01.htm)

For me at least, Vandiver’s translation is far superior in its diction and style than Herbert’s. But regardless of poetic merit, Vandiver manages to recreate the sense of ‘other’ that is present in Sapphic meter, and therefore the poem is far more effective in my opinion because it feels authentically Sapphic rather than being forced into the awkward heroic couplets which trivialise Herbert’s poem.

This is why I felt compelled to write in Sapphics, for although I am sure that she is tired of listening to reams of badly written odes to the Goddess, there is a certain type of lyric poem which needs the mix of plaintive insistence and elated meditation that comes from the Sapphic stanza.

© 2006, Eloise Stonborough

~~~~

About Eloise Stonborough

I was born in London in 1988, and I have lived there all my life. I studied English, Economics and Politics for my A levels. I started writing poems six months ago after I picked up a book on versification before a family holiday and started writing blank verse as an antidote to my insane family. I am taking a gap year before uni to write and travel, and at uni I want to study English lit (I'm not sure where I'm going yet). I came out when I was 15 to my close friends but came out to everyone else by going out with another girl who was two years above me at my (all-girls boarding) school. It was the biggest scandal in 20 years, and at one point there was a petition signed by the Christian Union and some parents to have me kicked out.