Sappho Poetry Analysis

For some time, there has been a debate over whether love is a feeling or a choice. That is, whether love will simply erode away over time and stress or if two people can keep love alive if they are willing to look for the things that they first made them fall in love even when those things are not always easy to see. Poets of love poems commonly say that love is a feeling, and Sappho, a poet of ancient Greece, is no different. I believe that Sappho writes about love as a passion because her poems rarely consist of long-standing relationships, the love mentioned in the poems is commonly an all-consuming infatuation, and the characters mentioned in the poems are often affected negatively by the infatuation. When asked if love is a passion or

This is demonstrated in Sappho’s poems because her characters are often negatively affected by the love or infatuation the poems are about. In Poem 94 the speaker states, “I simply want to be dead,” because the woman he or she loves is leaving (Sappho 641). This presents how the romantic feelings in Sappho’s poems often negatively affect her characters because the speaker of this poem is suicidal after the ending of the aforementioned romantic relationship. The speaker is ruled by her emotions and overcome with grief when the two partners are not able to work together and save the relationship. While it is not unusual for one to feel depressed after the termination of a relationship, the degree of misery that the speaker feels is directly connected to intense infatuation she held for her partner. The speaker is not the only character affected, and this is shown in Poem 1 when Aphrodite tells Sappho what she will make the object of Sappho’s affection do, “If she does not love, soon she will love/even unwilling” (Sappho 638). The other woman mentioned in this poem will be forced to love someone who she does not wish to love, which will negatively affect her because she is being forced to do something against her will. This reveals that her love is not a choice, but a passion forced onto her by a god. The characters of Sappho’s poems are often negatively affected by the love mentioned in the poems and feel those negative emotions very