It Seems to me (Edm 2)

It seems to me he’s equal to the gods, the
man
who sits within the scope of your sweet voice
and
of your  laughter, which stirs the heart within my breast

Seeing you like this,
even for a second,
stops the sighs
within me.

Yet my tongue
freezes
and
beneath my skin a fire rages
and…
my eyes are empty but
my ears are full.

A torrent of sweat
and
a wild tremor
overwhelm me
and,

I’ve turned the colour of drying grass
just before death.

 godly or Godly intervention ?

Preliminary to the close figurative analysis we are required to interact with the title, although ambiguous; the vagueness of the title sets the urgent tonality for the poem to discover what the author was referring to. The reader can speculate that throughout the poem the thesis will clarify the title’s intention; ergo removing the poem from its cryptic tonality into a clear bridge between the title and the content thus identifying what Sappho thesis. However, the figure of lust emerges with all its complications: jealousy, anxiety, and health deterioration.

Sappho opens up the with simile of a man that is like deity, the creator and ruler of the universe and source of all moral authority; the supreme being, a deity. She observes the divinity sitting within the scope of someone’s sweet voice. From the first line we can glean she yearns to be as close as voice can travel before being carried away from the wind. In hopes of hearing the laughter. The happiness she observers through the exchange of dialogue between both people “stirs the heart within [her] breast.” This metaphor indicates to the reader that she is moved by the happiness the “godly man” brings to what we can infer is a woman.

However here the figure of lust emerges. Sappho notes that seeing her in such bliss even merely a second stops the sighs within her. Although implicit at first the stopping of “sighs” is in fact an allegory that because of the magnitude of Sappho’s lust the stopping of sigh could only come with the stopping of breathing. This is explained in the third stanza where Sappho says her tongue freezes and beneath her skin a fire rages. This metaphor is twofold, one it leads us to infer that the jealousy and anxiety made Sappho livid, but by the same token it caused damaging visceral responses of the body when there is lack of oxygen. This is further supported with: “my eyes are empty but my ears are full.” Now being in an unconscious state not being able to see trouble could be brewing for the man speaking to Sappho’s precious love because her eyes were now “empty” meaning they saw nonentity and would not recognize any thing action they might have committed. Because she was guided by her “full” ears, in other word only by what she was hearing, implying that she was listening to their conversations.

Again one of the seven deadly sins and the figure of lust reappears with its health deterioration. Remembering that the lack of breath caused by what was seen caused Sappho’s to go unconscious. She hyperbolizes how much she sweated along with and how violently she shook that it overwhelmed her and made her faint as a result of the lack of oxygen. In her last stanza she recognizes that she has neared death and describes how without oxygen she has turned the same color as dying grass, that is to say pale, without oxygen in the blood flow. She compares living without her love to her living without oxygen.

  All this links back to the title “It Seem to me”—because in the love triangle that Sappho finds herself in; the figure of lust and the godly man that Sappho’s mentions doesn’t allow her to open her mouth because the relationships she is interested in pursuing is being denied by a “godly man” that bring her love happiness. The fact that her tongue freezes, and she faints is because of the lack of oxygen. In a sense she wants to go purse her love; we can Sappho tried to overcome this godly man with “empty eyes” however since she still was full of hearing she had to hear the divine, and with the divine we have the associate of heterosexual relationships. It could have been divine intervention or mere health problems. Nonetheless the figure of lust along with the jealousy, anxiety, and health deteriorations that it entailed was the fall of Sappho. It seemed to Sappho this relationship was possible, but in the end we still do not know.