A woman watches the person she loves sitting beside someone else, laughing, and the sight dismantles her body: her heart hammers, her tongue breaks, fire runs beneath her skin, her ears roar, sweat pours down, and she turns greener than grass. Sappho composed these lines on the island of Lesbos twenty-six centuries ago, and no poet since has surpassed their rendering of desire as a physical catastrophe. The fragment survives only because Longinus quoted it as an example of the sublime, preserving by accident what time would have swallowed. What remains is enough. In fewer than twenty lines, jealousy, longing, and the annihilation of the self before beauty are given their permanent and most devastating form.