Birdyline Book Blog

In studying both Sappho’s fragments and Rich’s Hubble Photographs: After Sappho, the legacy of art across decades, strengthened by common human interests, can be observed. Poems as old and incomplete as Sappho’s works could be disregarded in our modern time. Their worth could be questioned after so many years. Yet in Rich’s response to Sappho’s work, we can trace a direct line of inspiration coming from Sappho, to Rich, to more potential interpretations.

Sappho and Rich both make claims about what the pinnacle of emotion is for humans. Sappho writes, “Some say an army of horsemen, others a host of infantry,/others a fleet of ships is the most beautiful thing/on the black earth. But I say/it’s whatever you love.” (Fragment 16) Rich seems to respond by acknowledging, “it should be the most desired sight of all/the person with whom you hope to live and die,” (lines 1-2) but she expands on it. Similar to how Sappho references the gods and myths of her time, Rich turns her narrative towards something much larger than humankind. She describes space as “…liberations, lacerations of light and dust/ exposed like a body’s cavity, violet green livid and venous, gorgeous.” (lines 9-10) This disagreement of the two argues about the answer to a shared experience posed as a question: what is important to humanity? The answer, in this case, can be simplified regardless of time period to the poems (or arts as a whole) themselves. Rich’s response to Sappho is a very direct example of inspiration, but people are subconsciously inspired or silent on their muses all the time. Art remains a hugely important part of the way that humans process emotions and knowledge, and all art is connected to past iterations as can be seen from Rich’s link to Sappho. 

Sappho’s primary theme was love, an incredibly common theme still found in other poetry but also television, music, books, and virtually any creative format in existence. Sappho’s concern for something that is so human is what keeps her relevant. If Sappho had chosen to focus on the Greek myths of her time and not added her own feelings to them, she may have faded into obscurity. Instead, she wrote things like “He seems to me equal to gods that man/whoever he is who opposite you/sits and listens close…” blending her culture with an emotion that existed centuries before and after her. Rich may have come to a different conclusion on what is the most desirable sight, but at the end of the day, her need to pose a rebuttal comes from her simultaneous acknowledgment that Sappho’s opinions hold up to this day.

Human culture changes wildly over time, but Sappho and Rich’s work proves that certain things about us never change. The feelings Sappho felt were relevant to Rich, whose work in turn is relevant to people today. Most modern people will not have much at all in common with Sappho, and will have some different cultural experiences than Rich did nineteen years ago, and yet it is not likely that anyone in this modern age or fifty years from now will be able to say the theming of love, desire, or awe are not something that impacts them every day.