17 pages • 34 minutes read
Fragment 31
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Further Reading & Resources
Related Poems
“Catullus 51” by Gaius Valerius Catullus (c. 84 – c. 54 BC)
Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus lived in ancient Rome from 84-54 BCE. He was an admirer of Sappho, and he wrote his own adaptation of “Fragment 31” in Latin. Many translations of Sappho’s “Fragment 31” exist, but “Catullus 51” may be the earliest. The meter of the poem is Sapphic, and its situation and themes are same as the ones that appear in “Fragment 31,” but Catullus addresses his muse, Lesbia; as well, Catullus’s speaker departs from Sappho’s speaker’s intense emotional experience by linking their difficult emotions to the ruination of rulers and their cities.
“Sapphics” by Algernon Charles Swinburne (1924)
Victorian English poet Algernon Charles Swinburne followed the footsteps of Catullus by writing his own series of Sapphics, which is the literary term denoting the form of poetry favored by Sappho herself. Sapphics consist of quatrains made up of three long lines followed by a single brief line, and the 20 quatrains of Swinburne’s “Sapphics” all capture his vision of Sappho as she lived in ancient Greece.
“Jealousy” by Rupert Brooke (1991)
The English poet Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) is most famous for his World War I poetry and his identification with the Georgian poets. “Jealousy” shares several literary elements with “Fragment 31,” including the use of apostrophe, the catalog of body parts, and the theme of love and jealousy. Just as the speaker of “Fragment 31” directly addresses her beloved as a rival appears on the scene, so does the speaker of “Jealousy.” Unlike Sappho’s speaker, however, who grows listless as a result of her jealousy, Brooke’s speaker is angry and embittered by their experience, ending the poem with a kind of curse rather than weary submission.
“Go, Lovely Rose” by Edmund Waller (1645)
The 17th-century English poet Edmund Waller published this lyric poem in 1645. The speaker of the poem speaks directly to a rose, asking the bloom to talk with his beloved about his worthiness and the fact that their lives are brief. At the end of the poem, the speaker commands the rose to die after it speaks with the woman, to remind the woman of her own mortality.
Further Literary Resources
“What We Know of Sappho” by Judith Schalansky (translated from the German by Jackie Smith) (2020)
In this article in The Paris Review, German Arts and Culture writer Judith Schalansky explores the little historical information scholars have about the poet Sappho. Even while listing sparse details like the unusual origins of Sappho’s name, which is sourced to the lost kingdom of the Hittites, to the fact of her noble birth, this article acknowledges that few other women poets have been the object of such intense speculation. Schalansky combines classical scholarship with historical context and close readings of Sappho’s poetry to create an article that is unusual in both its breadth and its depth of Sapphic study.
In Our Time: Sappho (2015)
This audio recording by the British Broadcasting Company (BBC) features English author and parliamentarian Melvyn Bragg and his guests discussing the poet Sappho. Classics scholar and professor Edith Hall, of King’s College, London, joins two other scholars, Professor of English Margaret Reynolds, of Queen Mary, University of London, and Professor of Greek Literature Dirk Obbink of Christ Church, Oxford, in this discussion of Sappho’s enduring timelessness. They voice their appreciation of adaptations of Sappho’s works through their discussion of translations by poets as varied as Ovid, Christina Rossetti, and Charles Baudelaire and works of other poets inspired by Sappho herself.
“Girl, Interrupted: Who was Sappho?” by Daniel Mendohlson (2015)
In this article in The New Yorker, the author discusses an antique collector’s surprise find of papyrus scraps dating from 200 A.D., on which five stanzas of a poem appeared, written in ancient Greek. The poem was eventually attributed to Sappho, and the news made international headlines, much to the surprise of Classics scholars around the world. The rest of the article discusses the mysterious identity of Sappho as well as the controversies that surround her. Like Schalansky, of The Paris Review article mentioned above, Mendohlson is incredulous at the fact that Sappho is a “poet whose status is so disproportionate to the size of her surviving body of work.” Mendohlson also addresses Sappho’s role in identity politics of today as he attempts to explore the much-debated question of Sappho’s sexuality.
“Fighting Lesbian Erasure in Historiography: Restoring Sappho as a Queer Identity” by Amber Barry (2020)
Amber Barry, a student at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, wrote this article for the History Department’s online publication, The Manchester Historian. She addresses the synonymizing of Sappho’s name with “queer female desire” and acknowledges the etymology of the word “lesbian,” which originates in the island of Sappho’s birth and residence, Lesbos. Barry also describes the literary and academic processes by which some scholars appear to minimize queer readings of Sappho’s works, rendering them as little more than Sappho’s expressions of “vague aesthetic appreciation” of the women in her community. Barry acknowledges that such speculation about Sappho’s life and relationships will endure, as so few historical and biographical sources have survived the passage of time; yet, Barry argues, these diluted readings of Sappho’s poetry speak to “the double-standard in historiography that has for so long put the work of marginalized voices under such unbalanced and intensive scrutiny.”
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