Rucker, GSI Kuan

Kathryn Rucker

GSI: Kuan Hwa

October 8^th, 2016

Sweeter Than the Apple

In the fragmented poem, Sweet Apple (10), Sappho uses vivid imagery and various literary tropes in order to characterize the nature of the unidentified person that is the focus of this piece. By comparing this person, an Apostrophe, to typical objects found in nature, Sappho shows how the inspiration of the piece is someone who surpasses the ordinary limitations of human nature. Sappho uses an anaphora rhetorical scheme to parallel the two similes that are used to further develop the attributes that the Apostrophe of the poem possesses and show how they transcend beyond the physical plane.

At the beginning of this fragment Sappho says, “You’re… Just like the sweet apple,” forming a simile that links the Apostrophe, a non-present person, to the following actions that take place towards the inanimate object. In the next line Sappho writes that the apple is, “missed by the apple pickers”; the word “missed” is another rhetorical trope, called a syllepsis, and goes on to govern the implicit meaning of the two different understandings of the word “they” that follows in the final sentences of this stanza. In this quote, the word “missed” is referring directly to the apple as a physical object that has been left behind or forgotten due to the physical limitations of the apple pickers. This apple is incapable of being obtained by the apple pickers because it is attached to the highest branch possible on a tree and it is beyond their current physical capabilities to get ahold of it.

The next line of the poem shifts the object of focus from the apple to the Apostrophe as Sappho writes, “ They did not miss you… They just couldn’t reach so high”, comparing how they could not physically obtain an apple to the reason that subject of this piece might be left behind. In this case, when the word “missed” is applied to the first “they” it means that the poem’s subject was not left behind in the physical way that the apple was. In the final line Sappho writes about how the subject was not just unobtainable but also unreachable, showing that Sappho considers that the qualities the Apostrophe possesses to be elevated above even the apple on the highest branch. In this case the word “missed” modifies the second appearance word “they” to mean “their” inability to reach the subject in addition to obtaining it.  

This changes the meaning from the physical “missed” that was originally implicated with the first “They” and changes it into a metaphysical quality that places the Apostrophe beyond the physical plane. At the beginning of the poem, the apple is given qualities befitting a fruit; it is “sweet” and “reddening”, but the meaning of these words will become more significant once they are considered within the new context of the poem. The Apostrophe is beyond the qualities that the apple possess, however that is not to say that the subject of the poem is beyond his or her prime, if that were the case then a more accurate simile would be like an apple on the ground: rotten. This is not the case and Sappho was likely attempting to expand upon the ways in which the subject of the poem was beyond the physical world in the characterizations found in the next stanza.

The second, and final, stanza creates the anaphora through the repeated use of the first stanza’s phrase “You’re just like”, however this time the Apostrophe’s qualities are compared to that of a purple hyacinth flower growing in the mountains. This second simile closely parallels the first and shows where the poem comes to a fragmented ending by not completing the format of the first stanza. Instead of the hyacinth being, “missed by the apple pickers”, the flower is “trodden by the shepherds”, before the stanza breaks off two sentences later. It is easy to extrapolate, based upon the prior stanza’s form, that Sappho would have intend to elaborate more in the second stanza than the fragmented meaning that survived.