Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us.
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About Sappho
Sappho was an Archaic Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos, writing around 600 BC. She is one of the earliest known female poets in Western literary history. In antiquity she was called "the tenth Muse" and admired as highly as Homer.
Only one complete poem survives — "Ode to Aphrodite" — along with approximately 200 substantial fragments of her larger body of work, much of it lost when the Library of Alexandria burned. Her poetry focused primarily on love, desire, and longing, using the Sapphic meter (named after her) with extraordinary compression and feeling. Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002) is the most celebrated modern translation, treating the textual gaps in the fragments as meaningfully as the surviving words.
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Sappho's Famous Quotes
“Someone, I tell you, in another time will remember us.”
Sappho wrote on the island of Lesbos around 600 BC, leading a community of young women in the arts and devotion to the goddess Aphrodite. Nearly all her work was lost over the following centuries — we have one complete poem and perhaps 200 substantial fragments. This fragment''s prediction ("someone will remember us") has proved exactly right across 2,600 years. It reads as both a statement about the persistence of art and a personal act of consolation.
“I simply want to be dead. Weeping she left me.”
This fragment survives with gaps — it is part of a longer poem in which Sappho and another woman part ways. The rawness of "I simply want to be dead" is startling in its directness across millennia: grief of this intensity was written down, shared, and preserved. Anne Carson''s translations of the Sapphic fragments treat the gaps in the text as meaningful — the white spaces on the page represent what time erased. Reading Sappho is always reading around absence.
“Although they are only breath, words which I command are immortal.”
— Fragment (Barnard 9; preserved in Hephaistion)
This fragment is addressed to a woman Sappho is criticizing for having no share in the roses of the Muses — no aesthetic or intellectual cultivation. The claim is not about vanity but about survival: words outlast breath, outlast bodies, outlast civilizations. Sappho''s own immortality has proved her point. Written around 600 BC, her fragments have outlasted the political institutions, languages, and religions of a hundred empires.
“With his venom irresistible and bittersweet that loosener of limbs, Love reptile-like strikes me down.”
Sappho''s love poetry is distinguished by its use of physical symptoms to describe the experience of desire — the "loosener of limbs" (lusimelēs in Greek) appears in multiple fragments. The image of Love as a reptile is not metaphorical decoration but a precise phenomenological report: desire strikes, it is involuntary, it paralyzes. Her vocabulary for love was medical as well as lyrical, and her descriptions have influenced poets from Catullus to Emily Dickinson.
“Love shook my heart like the wind on the mountain rushing over the oak trees.”
The comparison of love to wind shaking oak trees is characteristic of Sappho''s precision: she consistently uses natural phenomena not as decoration but as exact analogies for interior experience. The wind is not metaphorically like love — it is the accurate external equivalent of what love does to the body. Her fragments are some of the earliest examples in Western literature of using the natural world to describe psychological states.
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Sappho was an Archaic Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos, writing around 600 BC. She is one of the earliest known female poets in Western literary history. In antiquity she was called "the tenth Muse" and admired as highly as Homer. Only one complete poem survives — "Ode to Aphrodite" — along with approximately 200 substantial fragments of her larger body of work, much of it lost when the Library of Alexandria burned. Her poetry focused primarily on love, desire, and longing, using the Sapphic meter (named after her) with extraordinary compression and feeling. Anne Carson's If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho (2002) is the most celebrated modern translation, treating the textual gaps in the fragments as meaningfully as the surviving words.
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