Lover’s Leap
Joseph Addison tells the legend of the great Greek poetess Sappho and the Lover’s Leap.
1711
Queen Anne 1702-1714
Joseph Addison tells the legend of the great Greek poetess Sappho and the Lover’s Leap.
1711
Queen Anne 1702-1714
Sappho was born in about 612 BC on the island of Mytilene (Lesbos), and became one of the great love poets of ancient Greece. She belonged to an intimate sorority dedicated to Aphrodite and the Muses; she had a daughter named Clëis; and she had three brothers. Few other facts are known. Even the tale of her death is a melodramatic legend; but it has furnished us with the ‘lover’s leap’.
abridged
AMONG the mutilated* poets of antiquity there is none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry. She felt the passion in all its warmth, and described it in all its symptoms.
An inconstant lover, called Phaon, occasioned great calamities to this poetical lady.* She fell desperately in love with him, and took a voyage into Sicily, in pursuit of him, he having withdrawn himself thither on purpose to avoid her. It was in that island, and on this occasion, she is supposed to have made the Hymn to Venus.* Her Hymn was ineffectual for procuring that happiness which she prayed for in it. Phaon was still obdurate, and Sappho so transported with the violence of her passion, that she was resolved to get rid of it at any price.
* ‘Mutilated’ in the sense that we have only snatches of what they wrote. Sappho’s surviving fragments, many of them passed down as brief quotations in the writings of ancient literary critics, may be read in Lyra Graeca Vol. I (1922), edited by J. M. Edmonds. Some modern collections of her poetry are akin to a whole symphony ‘completed’ from little more than a bar of music. For example, the solitary line ‘And down I set the cushion’ was developed by acclaimed American poet John Myers O’Hara (1870-1944) into a striking but otherwise completely modern poem of four four-line stanzas headed ‘the first kiss’. The words he took for his opening had survived only because Herodian (170-?240) found in them an unusual word for a cushion (τύλη).
* What follows is regarded today as legend, and did not appear until some two hundred years after Sappho’s lifetime. It was developed at length by Roman poet Ovid (43 BC - AD ?18) among his Heroides, in the form of a fictitious letter written as if from Sappho to Phaon. Addison himself added generously to the legend in The Spectator III No. 233 (Tuesday, November 27th), this time indulging his humour by pretending to translate a “little Greek manuscript, which is said to have been preserved in the temple of Apollo, upon the promontory of Leucate”.
* Venus was the Roman name for the Greek goddess Aphrodite, the goddess of love. Addison appended his own English translation of it: see The Spectator III No. 223 (Thursday, November 15th). See the original and several translations and paraphrases into English by authors from George Herbert (1593-1633) to John Addington Symonds, Jr (1840-1893) in ‘Sappho’ (1920), by Henry Thornton Wharton (1846-1895).
Express the ideas below in a single sentence, using different words as much as possible. Do not be satisfied with the first answer you think of; think of several, and choose the best.
A lot of ancient Greek love poetry has survived. Much of it is in fragments only. Sappho’s fragments are as beautiful as any.
See if you can include one or more of these words in your answer.
ICome down. IIIncomplete. IIINone.