Figurative Reading of Sappho’s ‘It Seems to me (Edm 2)’

Win Kyaw

GSI: Kuan Hwa

Rhetoric 103A

November 18, 2016

Figurative Reading of Sappho’s ‘It Seems to me (Edm 2)’

            In the poem ‘It Seems to me (Edm 2)’ Sappho gives a figuratively powerful rendition of what it is like to have feelings for someone else. Composed from the first-person perspective, the poem mostly dwells on the intensity in the experience of love and the transformation that takes place in the lover. The poet makes interesting decisions in terms of figurative language: while the trope of simile is used to organize the poem, tropes like metonymy and schemes such as polysyndeton and antithesis are employed in order to vividly depict the intensity and the corresponding transformation in an instance of love.

By placing the simile of a god-like man at the beginning of the poem, Sappho prepares the ontological framework for conveying how intense the experience of love is for a loving human being, who comes to resemble a vegetative life-form by the end of the poem. The poem begins by ontologically elevating “the man who sits within the scope of [the loved one’s] sweet voice and of [her] laughter.” It seems to the ‘I’ of the poem that the man is “equal to the gods.” According to the hierarchy of beings that the poem seems to assume, the likening of a human to gods opens up the possibility that beings so ungodly in their vulnerability and instability can come to be like or resemble, if not become, a god, i.e. a being of immortality, invulnerability, etc. But, as the poem subsequently shows, the lover in the poem moves in the opposite direction of becoming due to the intensity within the emotionally imbued experience of love.

To vividly draw out the sheer intensity of the experience, Sappho gives a figuratively intriguing treatment of the senses. While the figure of the god-like man is marked by his being located in the scope of the voice and laughter of the loved one, the lover does not even need that privilege to feel the intensity of love. For the lover, seeing the loved one, “even for a second, stops the sighs within [her].” Choosing the faculty of eyesight here is not arbitrary as it does the figurative work of distancing the lover from the loved one in order to dramatize how the sensation of love can be intense irrespective of the object of love. In this regard, one can even take the hyperbole of seeing the loved one for a second literally because such minimal contact suffices on its own to trigger severe changes in the lover and the poem does not dwell much upon the object of love in the first place. 

By using schemes such as polysyndeton and antithesis and by giving a figurative treatment of body organs that serve as instances of metonymy for their corresponding faculties, the poem memorably brings out the intensity and the transformation brought about by the experience of love. First, as mentioned previously, sheer sight of the loved one halts “the sighs within me,” which could be taken as metonymic for one’s inner, mental life filled with gratifications, frustrations, etc. But, the phenomenon of being in love does not stop at the silencing of one’s consciousness and desires. The alarming intensity and transformation that takes place in the remaining faculties of the lover are communicated through the scheme of polysyndeton or the use of conjunctions like ‘and’ in close succession, even in places that do not require them. This can be found in the last three stanzas of the poem. One line telling what is happening in one body organ and, in extension, one faculty of the lover is connected by the conjunctions to other lines reporting remarkable changes in the body, thereby acting out a sense of being overwhelmed through a syntax marked by prolongation of sentences and delay of closure. The scheme of antithesis or juxtaposition of opposite ideas is found here too as the metaphorical “freezing” or disabling of the lover’s tongue is coupled with a symbolic “fire,” an element of intensity, that “rages beneath the skin”; likewise, “empty” eyes, presumably needing no more than one-second eye contact with the loved one, are paired with ears that are “full,” presumably with her voice and laughter and no longer able to take in more noise. Thus, the intensity of a love experience is vividly expressed through an overwhelming gamut of contrary feelings and sensations occurring simultaneously in different parts of the body. Also, the silencing of the mind and the freezing of the tongue can also be read as Sappho’s attempt to distance love from being understood as a cognitive, linguistic, discursive act and instead portray it figuratively as a significant bodily event in its own rights, with its special quality of emotional intensity.  

On the other hand, the bodily changes show a consistent pattern of ontological descent, so to speak, as the loving human being loses mental, linguistic, and sensory faculties in that order. Eventually, taken over by non-voluntary bodily mechanisms like sweating and tremoring, the ‘I’ of the poem likens her own color to that of “drying grass just before death,” thereby suggesting a similarity between two dissimilar entities like a human being and a vegetative being. Death is also invoked perhaps as an example of non-being, the other end of the ontological spectrum from immortal gods. Thus, the lover, having undergone the intense, emotional roller-coaster of being in love, is displaced from her human state and led in the opposite direction of gods and their godly invincibility. The dilemma of love as Sappho configures it seems to be that either one strives to be god-like like the man in the scope of the loved one’s voice and laughter, totally insensitive and indifferent to the intensity of being in love, or one stakes even one’s own humanity by taking on the transformative, emotionally taxing aspect of love.