Her style was sensual and melodic; primarily songs of love, yearning, and reflection. Most commonly the target of her affections was female, often one of the many women sent to her for education in the arts. She nurtured these women, wrote poems of love and adoration to them, and when they eventually left the island to be married, she composed their wedding songs. That Sappho's poetry was not condemned in her time for its homoerotic content (though it was disparaged by scholars in later centuries) suggests that perhaps love between women was not persecuted then as it has been in more recent times. Especially in the last century, Sappho has become so synonymous with woman-love that two of the most popular words to describe female homosexuality--lesbian and sapphic have derived from her.
a translation of some of her work....
I have not had one word from her
Frankly I wish I were dead
When she left, she wept
a great deal; she said to me, "This parting must be
endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly."
I said, "Go, and be happy
but remember (you know
well) whom you leave shackled by love
"If you forget me, think
of our gifts to Aphrodite
and all the loveliness that we shared
"all the violet tiaras,
braided rosebuds, dill and
crocus twined around your young neck
"myrrh poured on your head
and on soft mats girls with
all that they most wished for beside them
"while no voices chanted
choruses without ours,
no woodlot bloomed in spring without song..."
2006-06-06 12:13:36
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answer #1
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answered by melissa 6
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Sappho loved love. She loved her students, she had female lovers, often students, and male as well, at least one, she had a daughter, whom she loved, she often sang to Aphrodite whom she adored and I don't blame her, and she wrote wedding songs.
You should get a book of her poems, you'll see
2006-06-06 16:37:54
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answer #2
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answered by kaplah 5
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we can only guess since very few fragments of work survived and its impossible to tell which can be attributed to her precisely...but many "experts" ignore this
2006-06-06 12:18:17
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answer #3
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answered by Spud 3
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