How Does Sappho Express In Her Poem?

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Slice of Life: The Worlds of Women and Men in Ancient Greece

Throughout this slice of life, various questions were posed. Questions such as What emotions does Sappho express in her poem? How does Sappho describes her body's reaction to jealousy? What does Alcaeus long for while he is away from his homeland? Why is Alcaeus away from home? And How does the mood of these poems by Sappho and Alcaeus differ from the mood of Homer's Poetry? As I proceed I will answer these various questions.
To start, Sappho expresses heartbreak and jealousy in her poem through vivid imagery. She describes how her body aches and begins to become warm showing initially the jealousy of this other women. Then Sappho goes on to talk about how she develops a cold sweat, …show more content…

She talks about how it starts with a pain in her breast and a jolt in the heart. It quickly goes from there to a describing how her mouth becomes dry and how her tongue sticks. This further escalates to her feeling a fire beneath her skin. This fire causes her to lose sight and her ears begin to ache and "roar in their labyrinths" (Matthews/Platt/Nobel 46). From this fire, her body develops a cold sweat, and she starts shaking. Proceeding this, her body the becomes "greener than grass" (Matthews/Platt/Nobel 46). After this vivid description of anger and envy her body enters a state of numbness that she describes as "I am neither living nor dead and cry from the narrow between." (Matthews/Platt/Nobel 46). This masterful ordering of words has painted such a clear picture of her pain and reaction to …show more content…

Unlike Homer, who seemed to tell more stories of and epic proportion. Sappho and Alcaeus seem to focus more on real life, or life as it was. Where Homer has taken real life and exaggerated it some, adding details that may or may not have been completely factual. Homer also tended to over exaggerate the roles of the acclaimed hero, and how a person was perfect outside of one major flaw that would lead to their demise. Whereas Sappho and Alcaeus kept it more personal and realistic. Though they were still divided in that Sappho only talked about the women in the reading and how they felt only referencing man as the object of her pain, and Alcaeus spoke mostly of men, of himself really, and merely referenced women as a source of amusement for

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