Martin Bidney - The Be-Loving Imaginer Episode 44 - A Song for Sappho

The Be-Loving Imaginer

The Be-loving Imaginer Episode 44 -

A Song for Sappho

Sappho (ca. 610 BCE to 570 BCE) is the earliest woman poet we know of in Western literature. [Moses’ sister Miriam, called a “prophet” (“neviah”), leads the liberated Jews in a song of triumph in Exodus, but the two verses that she recites cannot be proved to be her own compositions; they may have been excerpted from a psalm by her brother.]

1

In the original poem I sing here (three sections, four stanzas per section), I express my feelings about her wondrous achievement. The tune I composed is based on her trademark stanza form. I demonstrate her “rhythm chart” and then show how singable it is.

Plato is said to have uttered the judgment that Sappho should be counted as the “tenth Muse,” the newest member of that sisterhood of patrons of the arts and sciences. I mention this in my Part One.

2

Sappho is widely attested to have produced a massive output of lyrics, but only a pamphlet-size collection survives. Since I can’t read her in Greek, I try to communicate with her spirit by singing in the rhythm she invented and prized.

Will such a stratagem work? I compare my singing of her rhythm to a child’s listening to the “ocean” roar in a seashell. The child doesn’t hear the physical ocean. What it hears is the sound of the circulation of the child’s own blood in the ear, vastly amplified by the intricately shaped shell! I learned this by consulting a scientific encyclopedia years ago. What the child hears, and what you too will hear in a seashell, is the FLOW OF THE OCEAN OF BLOOD WITHIN YOU. I note this in my Part Two while I sing and hear “the Sappho within me.”

3

In my Part Three I envision a chorus joining me in Sapphic song as the currents, waves, and waterdrops combine in the seashell’s ocean.