Lyric poem about love9/25/2023 ![]() How better to conclude this selection of some of the best Sappho poems than with this short lyric about the poet’s lyre? She views the ‘tortoiseshell’ instrument as a kind of extension of her voice, a ‘speaking instrument’, which is an integral part of her art. In her poem about this ageing figure, Sappho adopts the voice of someone growing old, before admitting that old age is inevitable for all humans who live to a ripe old age – and she cites Tithonus as a classic example. Victorian poems could be long and ambitious, and this is the crowning achievement of the Victorian long poem although really it’s as much a verse novel as it is an epic poem. It’s official: Tennyson was not the first poet to write a great poem about Tithonus, the lover (in classical myth) of Eos, goddess of the dawn, who was doomed to wither in her arms while his divine lover remained forever young. Aphrodite has made her fall in love (with a boy, this time, note) and she is presumably too lovesick, too busy daydreaming about him, to attend to her loom … Here’s another fragment, down-to-earth, straightforward, and light-hearted, which sees the poet chastising her mother for attempting to chastise her for neglecting her weaving work. The flower has become a ‘scarlet stain’: the beloved’s beauty is soiled (and spoiled). In the second fragment, Sappho addresses her beloved as a mountain hyacinth trodden underfoot by careless shepherds. ![]() The addressee is no ‘low-hanging fruit’ but someone out of bounds or off-limits: out of the poet’s, and everyone’s league. Animals: Poems for Kids The following poems are about animals by poets like Alberto Blanco, Elizabeth Bishop, William Blake, Lewis Carroll, and more. I love you not so much for your realities as for your ideals. In the first poem, her beloved is likened to Achilles’ apple (a red apple) blushing on a high branch of the tree. Read a selection of poems kids love by poets like Lewis Carroll, Jack Prelutsky, Shel Silverstein, Emily Dickinson, Langston Hughes, and more. Excerpt: I love you for what you are, but I love you yet more for what you are going to be. (The Victorian Pre-Raphaelite poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti also translated these two fragments in the nineteenth century.) These two Sapphic fragments, translated by Anita George and published in Poetry magazine in 1994, provide an insight into Sappho’s reputation as a love poet. Sappho then addresses Anactoria, the ‘army wife’ of the poem’s title, telling her that the sound of her returning footsteps would move the poet more than the sight of any cavalry or infantry soldiers … She uses Helen of Troy, praised as the face that launched a thousand ships, as an example in support of her argument: Helen’s beauty brought about the Trojan War. Lyric poetry expresses the thoughts and feelings of the poet and is sometimes contrasted with narrative poetry and verse drama, which relate events in the. This is a love poem in several senses of the term: Sappho rejects the idea that military force is the finest thing on earth, instead expressing the opinion that love is more beautiful and powerful than the military might of armies and fleets. ![]()
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