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Sappho’s longing
245 CLAREMONT (Additional note)
Will Fitzgerald
June 18, 2024
On Facebook, Fynn Titford-Mock and Connie Des Maries were curious about the mention of “the fine fragment of Sappho” in Alexander Pope’s reply letter to Robert Steele:
I do not send you word I will do, but have already done the thing you desire of me. You have it (as Cowley calls it) just warm from the brain. It came to me the first moment I waked this morning: Yet, you’ll see it was not so absolutely inspiration, but that I had in my head not only the verses of Adrian but the fine fragment of Sappho, &c.
Response to Richard Steele
Titford-Mock notes that not much of Sappho was available to Pope when he wrote his poem, and Des Marais suggests it is probably Sappho 31, a fragment that would have been available to Pope in Greek or English. This fragment is now among the best know of Sappho‘s works. In it, the narrator sees the object of her love being wooed by a man, and the strong physical reactions it causes in her. A literal translation reads thus:
That one seems to me the equal of the gods, who sits in thy presence and hears near him thy sweet voice and lovely laughter; that indeed makes my heart beat fast in my bosom. For when I see thee even a little I am bereft of utterance, my tongue is useless and at once a subtle fire races under my skin, my eyes see nothing, my ears ring, sweat pours forth and all my body is seized with trembling. I am paler than [dried] grass and seem in my madness little better than dead. But I must dare all.
Even in this prose translation, we can see some similar similar language to Pope’s poem.
Perhaps a portait of Sappho from a Pompeii fresco, Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
According to The Poems of Sappho, Pope would have had two English translations available to him, one published in 1711, the year before he wrote ”The dying Christian to his soul.“ The translation is by Ambrose Philips (with whom Pope would have a public falling-out in latter days). Here is the poem as he translated it:
He that sits next to thee now and hears
Thy charming voyce, to me appears
Beauteous as any Deity
That rules the skie.
How did his pleasing glances dart
Sweet languors to my ravish’d heart
At the first sight though so prevailed
That my voyce fail’d.
I’me speechless, feavrish, fires assail
My fainting flesh, my sight doth fail
Whilst to my restless mind my ears
Still hum new fears.
Cold sweats and tremblings so invade
That like a wither’d flower I fade
So that my life being almost lost,
I seem a Ghost.
Yet since I’me wretched must I dare
Sappho‘s narrator, feels herself fading away to a ghost, just as Pope‘s narrator feels his senses shutting down; the world is receding and it disappears. Both narrators feel their sight failing.The depth of Sappho’s feelings of jealousy and love matches the bliss of Pope‘s dying. I hear echoes of “How did his pleasing glances dart/Sweet languors to my ravish’d heart” in Pope‘s “trembling, hoping, ling’ring, flying” (which also echoes Pope’s translation of Hadrian’s poem).
I’m not a literary scholar, so perhaps I’m wrong, but I think it’s likely that this is “the fine fragment of Sappho” to which Pope refers.
Let me finish with Chris Childers’ fine interpretation of Fragment 31, from Literary Matters:
He seems like the gods’ equal, that man, who
ever he is, who takes his seat so close
across from you, and listens raptly to
your lilting voice
and lovely laughter, which, as it wafts by,
sets the heart in my ribcage fluttering;
as soon as I glance at you a moment, I
can’t say a thing,
and my tongue stiffens into silence, thin
flames underneath my skin prickle and spark,
a rush of blood booms in my ears, and then
my eyes go dark,
and sweat pours coldly over me, and all
my body shakes, suddenly sallower
than summer grass, and death, I fear and feel,
is very near.