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Sappho Quotes

630 BC–570 BC Greece

Sappho (Attic Greek: Σαπφώ; Aeolic Greek: Ψάπφω; c. 630 – c. 570 BC) was an Ancient Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music.

Greece
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Also known as: Sappho of Lesbos, Sappha

Random Sappho quote

38 quotes

Beauty endures only for as long as it can be seen;
Goodness, beautiful today, will remain so tomorrow.

Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta (1955)

Hesperus bringing together
All that the morning star scattered.

The moon has set,
And the Pleiades.
Midnight.
The hour has gone by.
I sleep alone.

Oh, my sweet Mother—'tis in vain—
I cannot weave, as once I wove—
So wildered is my heart and brain
With thinking of that youth I love!

Like the pippin blushing high
On the tree-top beneath the sky,
Where the pickers forgot it—nay,
Could not reach it so far away.

Virginity, virginity, when you leave me, where do you go?
I am gone and never come back to you.
I never return.

Sweetest mother, I can weave no more to-day,
For thoughts of him come thronging,
Him for whom my heart is longing—
For I know not where my weary fingers stray.

Of course I am downcast and tremble
with pity for my state
when old age and wrinkles cover me,
when Eros flies about
and I pursue the glorious young.
Pick up your lyre
and sing to us of her who wears
violets on her breasts. Sing especially
of her who is wandering.

Like the sweet apple reddening on the topmost branch,
the topmost apple on the tip of the branch,
and the pickers forgot it,
well, no, they didn't forget, they just couldn't reach it.

Like the sweet apple which reddens upon the topmost bough,
A-top on the topmost twig,—which the pluckers forgot, somehow,—
Forgot it not, nay, but got it not, for none could get it till now.

I loved you, Atthis, once, long, long ago...
You seemed to me a small, ungainly child.

Thou, Hesper, bringest homeward all
That radiant dawn sped far and wide:
The sheep to fold, the goat to stall,
The children to their mother’s side.

But thou shalt ever lie dead, nor shall there be any remembrance of thee then or thereafter, for thou hast not of the roses of Pieria; but thou shalt wander obscure even in the house of Hades, flitting among the shadowy dead.

Neither honey nor bee for me.

Truly, I wish I were dead.
She was weeping when she left me,
and said many things to me, and said this:
"How much we have suffered, Sappho.
Truly, I don't want to leave you."

Weave garlands, maiden, from the strands
Of dill, and with soft gentle hands
Set the delicious leafage round your head.
The Goddess and the happy Graces
Love to look on flower-crown’d faces,
But turn aside from the ungarlanded.

O dream on your black wings
you come when I am sleeping.
Sweet is the god but still I am
in agony and far from my strength.
for I had hope (none now) to share
something of the blessed gods,
nor was I so foolish
as to scorn pleasant toys.
Now may I have
all these things.

Rennell Rodd, Love, Worship and Death: Some Renderings from the Greek Anthology (London: Edward Arnold, 1919)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Sappho (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.