Sappho

 no: tongue breaks and thin

fire is racing under skin
and in eyes no sight and drumming
          fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking
grips me all, greener than grass
I am and dead—or almost
          I seem to me

                                        tr. Anne Carson 

 

“No speaking is left in me,” Carson translates, and then the new stanza begins with that full stop, “no:” as the poem shifts to a sexual surrender which cannot be withstood. “tongue breaks and thin/fire is racing under skin/and in eyes no sight and drumming/fills ears//and cold sweat holds me and shaking/grips me all.”

This is a poem of passion, of what passion feels like.  Sexual passion?  Yes.  Unlike the Homeric heroes who marshal their ranks and throw spears and make speeches, Sappho the poet lets us know what love feels like.  

Can it be doubted that these lines refer to sexual intercourse, and the death which follows is what poets in the Renaissance called ‘the little death,’ that of orgasmic climax (as opposed to that other death, which is mortality manifesting itself)?  ‘La petite morte,’ the French called it; the British adopted the phrase ‘little death’ in the sixteenth century.  But millennia before then Sappho recognized, in this poem, the similarity between death and sexual climax, which both result in a foreshortening of all the senses.  “I am cut by bitter and angry hail, I lose my breath,/ Steep'd amid honey'd morphine, my windpipe throttled in fakes of death,” writes Whitman in Song of Myself, two sections before he also writes of sexual climax (although, it should be noted, his climax is solitary, masturbatory:)

Immodestly sliding the fellow-senses away,
They bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me,
No consideration, no regard for my draining strength or my anger,
Fetching the rest of the herd around to enjoy them a while,
Then all uniting to stand on a headland and worry me.

The sentries desert every other part of me,
They have left me helpless to a red marauder,
They all come to the headland to witness and assist against me.

  Sappho understands how the senses are ‘bribed to swap off with touch and go and graze at the edges of me.’  Speech fails in her poem; then fire takes over her limbs, then she cannot see and only hears the pounding (of blood) in her ears.  She sweats and trembles, shaking, gripped in a physical passion that has overcome her, and to which she has surrendered all her will.  And she “lack[s] little/ of dying.”

Written By Huck Gutman