‘It Seems to Me” (Edm 2) is a lyric poem fragment
written in the first person by the female poet Sappho. In it, Sappho narrates
her observation of two figures: one is either a man or a representation of all
men, whom Sappho seems to envy, and the second is left somewhat genderless. Building
upon this framework, Sappho’s description shows that she is infatuated with the
latter figure, and knowing that Sappho intimately loved women we could
consequently infer that the figure is female. Steeped in these gender dynamics,
Sappho evokes dissonance of feeling and desire to substantiate her claim that,
while the nature of love is joyful and good, prohibited love decays one’s sense
of self, because the self becomes unstable. In this way, there is also a
physical dissonance between love’s journey from Sappho to the character she
loves, and its journey from that character to another. The internal instability is communicated in the fragment as
Sappho’s gender comes into conflict with her feelings toward the figure she
desires, and as she experiences incongruous emotional states beyond her control.
Sappho expresses three emotions as the poem progresses: (1) firstly, idealization
of the figure she watches; (2) secondly, simultaneous jealousy and lust; (3) and
thirdly, exhaustion. She utilizes emphasis,
paradox and metaphor, respectively, in order to convey these conflicting states.
One way in which she reveals her feelings
of discord is through her struggles with femininity and sexuality: contrasting
her own gender, the gender of the character she loves and ‘the man.’ She
employs emphasis (defined here as stressed
importance through omission) as a tool to reveal her inner strife, while
seeming to circumvent any serious subversion of the patriarchal world she lives
in. The figure whom she speaks to
seems to belong to a man. This is revealed by Sappho’s reference to “the man/
who sits within the scope of [the other character’s] sweet voice.” However, by
leaving the character whom she addresses ambiguously gendered, and therefore relying
on the reader to infer that she has some relationship with the man, Sappho emphasizes
that she feels she must conceal her love for women. This in turn shows us the
divisive conflict that Sappho feels towards her sexuality. It is owing to
Sappho’s use of emphasis that her
inner anxiety is able to reveal itself.
Sappho goes on to show her romantic
adulation of the figure whom she watches with the man. Sappho depicts the man
as “equal to the gods.” This seems to be high praise, yet it is not bestowed
upon him for anything related to his own goodness or virtue. Rather, this male
figure is left without any agency at all. His divinity is simply a prop to
highlight the masculinity of the man and aggrandize the divinity of the woman
“who [he] sits within the scope of.” This recipient of Sappho’s affection
possesses a laugh that “stirs the heart within [Sappho’s] breast.” The image of
the “breast” is associated with the female body and the life sustaining quality
that places women apart from men. In mentioning this, Sappho calls attention to
her gender and suggests again that the corporeal reality of her being a woman
may be the reason she is unable to be with the one she loves. It also
underlines what differentiates her from the man who is able to assume the role
she so desperately desires. For these reasons, she feels tortured by her
sexuality and the ways in which gender confines her physical body to one world,
while her heart lies in another.
Not only is there instability internal to
Sappho, but there is a structural instability between the objective world and
Sappho’s subjective experience. The relationship between the two figures that
Sappho observes is ambiguous as to whether the relationship is intimate or
platonic. One possibility is that Sappho left their relationship ambiguous in
order to, again, steer clear of societal disapproval of her intimate love for
women. However, a second possibility is that it is ambiguous even to Sappho,
herself, and the fact that it gives the impression of intimacy shows that there
is greater dissonance between objective reality and the subjective
romanticizing in the mind of Sappho. In this latter case, the ambiguity seems
to be a result of the fact that Sappho projects her own beliefs and
interpretations of others from the standpoint of someone who is deeply hurt by
the impossibility of requited love. However, ultimately we cannot know the true
assessment of a relationship that Sappho is not a part of. Regardless, the
centrality of the first person voice qualifies Sappho’s claims about love to be
of internal, psychological importance rather than of love as it exists beyond
her own mind.
Sappho demonstrates her internal struggle
by elucidating the paradoxical relationship
between feeling empathy for the character she loves while simultaneously being
pained by their distance. In the second stanza, Sappho’s tone shifts from one
of longing to one of relief and happiness. Just hearing the laughs and seeing
the joy of the one she loves “even for a second, stops the sighs within [her].”
No matter her sorrows and longing, she is able to find joy in her love, even if
it is unrequited, and she employs alliteration of the “s” to help capture the
calm that she feels. The mellow mood of the first half of the poem comes to a
close as the topic of love is abruptly overshadowed by jealousy. Sappho exposes
her inner discord by juxtaposing the ways in which love and jealousy interact; She
illustrates the way that her “tongue freezes and within [her] skin a fire
rages.” Sappho employs paradox here in that there is an apparent contradiction
between her body freezing and burning at once. The effect of this is to convey
how, internally, she feels a multiplicity of conflicting emotions. Her whole
entropic world of love and jealousy causes her to be pulled in many directions
of emotion and desire. Her paradoxical sensations of “hot” and “cold,” of “empty”
and “full” and the greater dichotomy of the love and jealousy, contend that
these feelings are incongruous; Yet, somehow Sappho embodies all of them. Further,
she extends her emotions to physical, bodily events. This is exemplified
through her abundant use of metaphor describing “a torrent of sweat,” “a wild
tremor,” and mentions of skin, tongue, eyes, and ears. These bodily reactions
are intertwined with her internal turmoil and function both to manifest the
lust that she feels towards the female figure and also to invert her inner
feelings outward for the reader to see.
This brings her to the final stage in her
emotional journey: total depletion of spirit. Through metaphor she is able to present the intangible ways in which her
emotional journey has consumed aspects of her selfhood. She narrates that her
“eyes are empty but [her] ears are full.” There is a clear construction of
opposite and incompatible things coming together which evokes dissonance. But her word choice, in
addition to her usage of metaphor, sheds light on the way she feels with regard
to unrequited love. Her “eyes [being] empty” implies blindness, which in this
case seems to be a blindness brought on by passion. She cannot see anything
that is not the woman she loves. On the contrary, she says that her “ears are
full.” If one’s ears are full, then nothing else can enter. She is deaf to the
world and can only hear the “sweet voice” and “laughter” that she has
described. Without eyes and ears, her sense of the world beyond love is
obscured and one can imagine her in a dark, intangible place. She ultimately
seems to buckle under the weight of the chaos that is her emotional plight, and
ends up in a state of utter exhaustion: her skin “the colour of drying grass.” She
metaphorically embodies dying grass,
“just before death.” This image of being on the edge of life and death serves
to situate her in a kind of limbo from which she can’t escape. All of this is
to say that, for Sappho, the progression of her love for someone who does not
and cannot reciprocate, leads her down a path in which the accumulation of clashing
feelings causes her to lose agentic parts of her selfhood; namely the ability
to see and hear and contribute to the world around her. She becomes frustrated
by the limitations of her gender, torn between her paradoxical feelings of love
and jealousy, and oblivious to the world outside of her love for another. Sappho’s
internalization of prohibited love leaves her stranded and paralyzed by her
inability to reconcile its effects.
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