One interpretation suggests that the man's precise relationship with the woman is not important. For instance, she suggests that they might just as well be brother and sister. William Race, for instance, says that the poem contains nothing to indicate that it is about a wedding, while Christina Clark argues that, though the interaction between the two characters observed by the speaker indicates that they are of similar social status, their interaction is likely to be compatible with a number of possible relationships, not just that between a bride and groom. Since the second half of the twentieth century, scholars have tended to follow Denys Page in dismissing this argument. A poem in the Greek Anthology which echoes the first stanza of the poem is explicitly about a wedding this perhaps strengthens the argument that fragment 31 was written as a wedding song. Wilamowitz suggested that the poem was a wedding song, and that the man mentioned in the initial stanza of the poem was the bridegroom.
The context of the poem has been the subject of much scholarly debate: Thomas McEvilley calls it the "central controversy" about the poem. The poem centres around three characters: a man and a woman, both otherwise unidentified, and the speaker. "That man seems to me to be equal to the godsįor when I look at you even for a short time,Īnd immediately a subtle fire has run over my skin,īut everything must be dared/endured, since (?even a poor man). The poem is written in the Aeolic dialect, which was the dialect spoken in Sappho's time on her home island of Lesbos. Four strophes of the poem survive, along with a few words of a fifth. Poem įragment 31 is composed in Sapphic stanzas, a metrical form named after Sappho and consisting of stanzas of three long followed by one short line. This might have been an alternative opening to Sappho 31. The opening words of the poem ("To me it seems that man." ) are almost identical to a fragment of Sappho quoted by Apollonius Dyscolus: "To himself he seems". A reconstruction of the poem by classicist Armand D'Angour suggests that the original poem may have had up to 8 stanzas. Four stanzas are well-preserved, followed by part of one more line this, as well as Catullus' adaptation of the poem, suggests that there was originally one more stanza of the poem, often thought to have been Sappho resigning herself to the situation in which she finds herself. Fragment 31 was one of the few substantial fragments of Sappho to survive from ancient times, preserved in the first-century AD treatise on aesthetics On the Sublime.
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