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The story of Tithonus was popular in archaic Greek poetry, though the reference to him in this poem seems out of place, according to Rawles. [16] However, Page duBois notes that the use of a mythical exemplum to illustrate the point of a poem, such as the story of Tithonus in this poem, is a characteristic feature of Sappho's poetry – duBois ...
[9] Tithonus's character offers a strong contrast to that of Ulysses. The two poems are matched and opposed as the utterances of Greek and Trojan, victor and vanquished, hero and victim. [10] According to critic William E. Cain, "Tithonus has discovered the curse of fulfillment, of having his carelessly worded wish come true.
[a] It is from Book I of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho's poetry, and is known from a second-century papyrus discovered at Oxyrhynchus in Egypt at the beginning of the twentieth century. Sappho 16 is a love poem – the genre for which Sappho was best known – which praises the beauty of the narrator's beloved, Anactoria , and expresses the ...
Sappho was an ancient Greek lyric poet from the island of Lesbos. She wrote around 10,000 lines of poetry, only a small fraction of which survives. Only one poem is known to be complete; in some cases as little as a single word survives.
The poem is composed in three-line stanzas based on glyconic cola, [12] made up of a creticus, three glyconics, and a bacchius, [13] the same metre as Sappho 95. [14] Though written over three lines, these stanzas are made up of a single verse without a metrical break, in several cases with words split over two lines. [ 15 ]
Sappho: A New Translation is a 1958 book by Mary Barnard with a foreword by Dudley Fitts.Inspired by Salvatore Quasimodo's Lirici Greci (Greek Lyric Poets) and encouraged by Ezra Pound, with whom Barnard had corresponded since 1933, she translated 100 poems of the archaic Greek poet Sappho into English free verse.
Her poems in this meter (collected in Book I of the ancient edition) ran to 330 stanzas, a significant part of her complete works, and of her surviving poetry: fragments 1-42. Sappho's most famous poem in this metre is Sappho 31 , which begins as follows:
Parts of ten stanzas of the poem are preserved, though only twelve lines are complete. [10] Only two lines of the first stanza of the poem are preserved, showing that at least one line – the first of that stanza – is missing. [11] It is unknown whether the poem originally had further stanzas either before or after the surviving portion. [5] [a]