Lest thou thy love and hate and me undoe,
To let mee live, O love and hate mee too.
John Donne, “The Prohibition”
A space must be maintained or desire ends. Sappho reconstructs the space of desire in a poem that is like a small, perfect photograph of the erotic dilemma. The poem is thought to be an epithalamium (or part of an epithalamium) because the ancient rhetorician Himerios alluded to it in the course of a discussion of weddings, saying:
It was Sappho who likened a girl to an apple … and compared a bridegroom to Achilles. (Orationes 9.16)
We cannot certainly say whether Sappho composed this poem for a wedding and intended it as praise of a bride, but its overt subject remains clear and coherent. It is a poem about desire. Both its content and its form consist in an act of reaching:
οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρῳ ἐπ᾽ ὔσδῳ,
ἄκρον ἐπ᾽ ἀκροτάτῳ, λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπηες,
οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ᾽, ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐδύναντ᾽ ἐπίκεσθαι
As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,
high on the highest branch and the applepickers
forgot—
well, no they didn’t forget—were not able to reach
…
(LP, fr. 105a)
The poem is incomplete, perfectly. There is one sentence, which has no principal verb or principal subject because the sentence never arrives at its main clause. It is one simile, whose point remains elusive since the comparandum never appears. It may be from an epithalamium, but it seems precarious to say so in the absence of the wedding party. If there is a bride, she stays inaccessible. It is her inaccessibility that is present. As the object of comparison suspended in line 1, it exerts a powerful attraction, both grammatical and erotic, on all that follows; but completion is not achieved—grammatical or erotic. Desiring hands close on empty air in the final infinitive, while the apple of their eye dangles perpetually inviolate two lines above.
The action of the poem occurs in present indicative verbs that attain, with the last word, infinite disappointment. This final falling short is gently, repeatedly prepared by what comes before. The three lines of the poem follow the poet’s mind on a trajectory through perception to judgment, a trajectory in which both the perception (of the apple) and the judgment (of why it is where it is) suffer self-correction. As the poet’s eye reaches up to locate the apple (“on a high branch”), that location is made more exact (“high on the highest branch”) and more remote. As the poet’s interpretation reaches to explain the apple (“and the applepickers forgot”), that explanation is emended in stride (“well, no they didn’t forget—were unable to reach”). Each line launches an impression that is at once modified, then launched again. Second thoughts grow out of initial misapprehensions, and this mental action is reflected in the sounds of the words as the anaphoric syllables reach after one another from verse to verse (akrō … akron … akrotatō lela-tbonto … eklelathont’). This motion is corroborated in the rhythm of the verse: dactyls (in lines 1 and 2) slow and elongate to spondees (in line 3) as the apple begins to look farther and farther away.
Each verse, we should also note, applies corrective measures to its own units of sound. The first verse contains two examples of a metrical procedure called ‘correption.’ Correption is a licence permitted to dactylic hexameter whereby a long vowel or diphthong is shortened but allowed to remain in hiatus before a following vowel. Here the two correptions occur in close succession (-tai akrō ep-) and make the verse seem crowded with sounds that move and rustle against one another, as the tree is thick with branches over which your eye climbs steadily to the topmost one. Lines 2 and 3 make use of a different corrective device: elision. Elision is a brusquer approach to the metrical problem of hiatus; it simply expels the first vowel. Elision occurs once in the second line (ep’ ak-) and three times in the third verse (-thont’ all’ ouk edunant’ ep-). Both correption and elision may be regarded as tactics to restrain a unit of sound from reaching beyond its proper position in the rhythm. The tactics differ in permissiveness, for the former partially concedes, while the latter entirely curtails, the reach. (Or one might think of correption as a sort of metrical décolletage, in contrast to elision, which bundles the too tempting vowel quite out of sight.) One gets the sense, as the poem proceeds, of a gradually imposed constraint. The reaching action of desire is attempted again and again in different ways through the different lines; with each line it becomes clearer that the reach will not succeed. The triple elision of line 3 is conspicuous. Lines 1 and 2 permit the poet’s eye a comparatively uninhibited ascent to the topmost apple. Line 3 crops the applepickers’ hands in midair.
There are five elisions in the poems, of which three affect the preposition epi. This word deserves our closer attention for it is crucial to the etymology and morphology of the poem. Epi is a preposition expressing motion to, toward, for, in quest of, reaching after. The action of this ardent preposition shapes the poem on every level. In its sounds, in its rythmic effects, in its process of thought, in its narrative content (and in its external occasion, if these lines are from an epithalamium) this poem acts out the experience of eros. It is a compound experience, both gluku and pikron: Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger. From her inchoate little poem we learn several things about eros. The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).