Sappho's Love Poetry: The Irresistible Power Of Love

People have tried to describe love in many different ways throughout history. Thousands of years ago Sappho wrote many love poems to express the feeling of one who falls in love. Her lyric poem fragment 31 is a particular example that presents the inconsistent and complex emotion of a lover. In this fragment, when the speaker discovers that her loved one was chatting with an unknown man, the lover develops mixed feelings toward the man and wonders about her own encounter with her loved one. The honesty of the text intimately draws the audience to share a sense of empathy of what love means to a lover expanding from past to present moment. This lyric poem effectively presents the irresistible power of love and the compelling effect of this affection that makes a lover to experience emotional and physical upheaval.

The first stanza sets an overall impression of this fragment that love is so complex and powerful for it turns a lover with incompatible mixed-feelings. The speaker opens this poem by

People usually relate god as powerful and compelling. And the speaker describes the man as god because she believes the unnamed man shares these traits of a god, since the man managed his emotions well and maintained self-control even he sits close to the beautiful beloved. Deeply entranced by the beloved one herself, the speaker cannot understand how can there exist actual person who can keep self-discipline under the leverage of love. She then chooses to label the unaffected man as god to explain this inhuman behavior and exception. By using an unknown man as a contrasting subject in this poem, the speaker strengthens her own emotion to her beloved and provides backgrounds against which the speaker’s own passion can be measured. Love is so overwhelming that no real human could free from being affected by