In the Library
Fragment 31
Sappho, 600 BCE
- Form
- Form Poem
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 5 minutes
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 0k words
£1.99
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Peer of gods he seemeth to me, the blissful Man who sits and gazes at thee before him,
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
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About the book
Equal to the gods, she calls the man who gets to sit across from the one she loves and simply listen to her talk. That is the whole wound: not his presence but his composure, the ordinary luck of a body that can hear that laughter and stay intact. Sappho's body cannot. The poem becomes a catalogue of her own collapse, taken down symptom by symptom as it happens, the tongue gone silent, a thin fire racing under the skin, the eyes blind, the ears roaring, sweat, trembling, a pallor greener than grass, and then the line that has outlived empires, that she is a little short of dying. No one had ever written desire this way before, from inside the falling body, and almost no one has done it better since. The poem breaks off mid-breath, the papyrus torn, the voice cut where the symptoms have already finished their work, and across twenty-six centuries you can still feel the room tilt.