Sappho 10
10. You came, and I was yearning for you; you plunged my heart into coolness when it flamed with longing.
Archilochus 35.
For such was the passion of love that coiled itself beneath my heart and poured thick mist across my eyes, robbing me of my tender senses.
In Eros the Bittersweet, Carson explains the love's duality. When in love, one initially experiences the pleasure of sexual desire but ultimately the bitterness of broken love. In the above fragments, both Sappho and Archilochus, describe this duality.
Stating," you plunged my heart into coolness when it flamed with longing", Sappho employs temperature as a love metaphor. Fire brings life, for man uses it as warmth and a way to obtain nourishment. However, fire also can kill and burn. The cold possesses a similar complexity. A cool breeze revitalizes, while a cold front results in hypothermia. Just as the temperatures can sustain or kill, so too can love bring forth emotional nourishment and crippling pain.
Archilochus's fragment also hints at love's fickle nature, but he expresses it through sensory imagery. Initially we think of love as beautiful and fulfilling, but Archilochus steers the reader away from the norm by claiming his love "coiled beneath his heart". Coiling illuminates snake imagery. Snakes are cool, scaly, aloof, and venomous. Thus, by describing his love as coiling, Archilochus transfers the qualities of the snake to his love. He further describes his troubling love as a "thick mist… robbing me of my tender senses". Thick mist obscures the sky and landscape, rendering man directionless, and confused. Similarly, Archilochus feels his love has robbed him the ability to find direction. Rather than elevating his view on life, love obscures his judgment.
Through the use of metaphor and sensory imagery, Sappho and Archilochus express the love's 'bittersweet' aspect.
You have a good knack for unpacking metaphors, which you demonstrate in your interpretation of both poets. One thing you need to put time into is properly formatting poetry citations - you can't cite it like a prose statement. Follow the line breaks per MLA guidelines. I noticed that there were some points where your language was awkward - "Coiling illuminates snake imagery" is overly compressed and imprecise. In your use of Carson, keep in mind that she's not stopping with love's duality, but spinning it out into a systematic account of the nature of poetic language. See how images of blocking/absence/mediation are placed in parallel with the duality of erotic longing. All of these together become a part of Carson's theory, which makes it much more applicable to a range of lyric poetry.
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