Blog Post 3 - Sappho 9-10 and Anacreon 5 Analyzation

Sappho 9-10:

Love shook

my mind like a wind falling on oak-trees on a mountain.

You came, and I was yearning for you;

you plunged my heart into coolness when it flamed with longing.

From Anne Carson’s point of view, this is a classic example of the “sweetbitter” experience. Sappho exemplified the experience of 'sweet' through the use of a simile describing how ‘love shook her mind’. The ‘wind in the oak-trees’ is the love. However, the oak-trees are on a mountain. This shows the precarious position in which ‘love shook (her) mind’. Too strong a gust and the ‘wind’ could begin to knock the trees down. With intents unknown to the writer, ‘you came’. This illustrates that there was a motive to you coming, whether good or bad is to be determined. That didn’t matter though, because ‘(she) was yearning for you’. And just as how Carson describes it, like the meaning of eros, lack, she wanted him because she desired and lacked him.  The bitter comes with a comparison of the ‘heart’ to and piece of iron being made. ‘You’, signifying that you disrupted the relationship and not her, the writer, ended the relationship suddenly just as how a piece of iron is ‘plunged…into coolness’. However this was not before her heart had already ‘flamed with longing’. Showing she was already in love with you.

Anacreon 5:

Once more tossing a purple ball

at me, Love with the golden hair

points at a girl in embroidered sandals.

But she (she comes from illustrious

Lesbos) laughs at my hair in scorn

(it’s turning white) and goes of gaping after another—girl.

Here, love is shown in the representation of a person.  So instead of a metaphor to describe the experience, Anacreon instead describes the person that he desires with ‘golden hair’. With this, we can begin to see the experience of ‘sweetbitter’. However, she ‘pointes at a girl’ with intentions unknown to the viewer. Since she is from the ‘illustrious Lesbos’, which is famous for its amount of women that liked other women, this may pose a problem. The speaker is lusting after ‘Love’ because he wants and lacks her, just as eros signifies lack. Bitter begins when the girl ‘laughs at (his) hair in scorn’. Although he has quickly fallen in sweet love, she did not show the same affection, showing how bitter quickly overcomes love. He can quickly note her ways as she ‘goes gaping after another—girl’. Her actions dash the hopes of love into a bitter experience.

Both of these poems display supporting information for Carson’s experience of the chronological event of ‘sweetbitter’. Sweet the the desire of a girl, and bitter with the fleeting hopes of love.