“Oh when, alas! shall more auspicious gales
To these fond eyes restore thy welcome sails?
If you return - ah why these long delays?
Poor Sappho dies while careless Phaon stays.
O launch thy bark, secure of prosp’rous gales;
Cupid for thee shall spread the swelling gales;
I you will fly - (yet ah! what cause can be,
Too cruel youth, that you should fly from me?)
If not from Phaon I must hope for ease,
Ah let me seek it from the raging seas:
To raging seas unpity’d I’ll remove,
And either cease to live or cease to love”
- Alexander Pope, Sappho to Phaon, translation of Ovid’s Heroides XV
Painting: Antoine Jean Gros, Sappho at Leucate, 1801
Sappho is such a fascinating figure. There are so many different scholarly opinions about her life but I seem to have fixated on one likely mythologized event wherein she fell in love with the ferryman named Phaon and when he did not return her love, she threw herself into the sea off of the cliffs at Leucate. I just love this painting, and the way she is clutching her beloved lyre, the tool of her craft. It’s so tragically captivating.
