The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form of four lines. Originally composed in quantitative verse and unrhymed, since the Middle Ages imitations of the form typically feature rhyme and accentual prosody. It is "the longest lived of the Classical lyric strophes in the West".
Definitions
In poetry, "Sapphic" may refer to three distinct but related Aeolic verse forms:
The greater Sapphic, a 15-syllable line, with the structure: – u – – – | u u – | – u u – u – – –=long syllable; u=short syllable; |=caesura The lesser Sapphic, an 11-syllable line, with the structure: – u – x – u u – u – – x=anceps (either long or short) The Sapphic stanza, typically conceptualized as comprising 3 lesser Sapphic lines followed by an adonic, with the structure: – u u – –
Classical Latin poets duplicated the Sapphic stanza with subtle modification.
Since the Middle Ages the terms "Sapphic stanzas" or frequently simply "Sapphics" have come to denote various stanzaic forms approaching more or less closely to Classical Sapphics, but often featuring accentual meter or rhyme (neither occurring in the original form), and with line structures mirroring the original with varying levels of fidelity.
Aeolic Greek
Alcaeus of Mytilene composed in, and may have invented, the Sapphic stanza, but it is his contemporary and compatriot Sappho whose example exerted the greatest influence, and for whom the verseform is now named. Both lived around 600 BCE on the island of Lesbos and wrote in the Aeolic dialect of Greek.
The original Aeolic verse takes the form of a 3-line stanza:
However, these stanzas are frequently analyzed as 4 lines, thus:
While Sappho used several metrical forms for her poetry, she is most famous for the Sapphic stanza. Her poems in this meter (collected in Book I of the ancient edition) ran to 330 stanzas, a significant part of her complete works, and of her surviving poetry: fragments 1-42.
Sappho's most famous poem in this metre is Sappho 31, which begins as follows:
(In this stanza, all anceps positions are filled with long syllables.) Transliteration and formal equivalent paraphrase (substituting English stress for Greek length):
Latin
Classical
A few centuries later, the Roman poet Catullus admired Sappho's work and used the Sapphic stanza in two poems: Catullus 11 (commemorating the end of his affair with Clodia) and Catullus 51 (marking its beginning). The latter is a free translation of Sappho 31.
Horace wrote several of his Odes in Sapphics, and two tendencies of Catullus became normative practice with Horace: the occurrence of a caesura after the fifth syllable; and the fourth syllable (formerly anceps) becoming habitually long. Horace's Odes became the chief models for subsequent Sapphics, whether in Latin or the later vernaculars — hence the term "Horatian Sapphic" for this modified model. But due to linguistic change, Horace's imitators split on whether they imitated his quantitative structure (the long and short syllables, Horace's metrical foundation), or his accentual patterns (the stressed or unstressed syllables which were somewhat ordered, but not determinative of Horace's actual formal structure). Gasparov provides this double scansion of Ode 1.22 (lines 1-4), which also displays Horace's typical long forth syllables and caesura after the fifth:
/ × × / × × × / × / ×
– u – – – u u – u – ∩
× / × / × / × × × / ×
– u – – – u u – u – –
× × × / × / × × × / ×
– u – – – u u – u – –
/ × × / ×
– u u – –
...
/=stressed syllable; ×=unstressed syllable; ∩=brevis in longo
Other ancient poets who used the Sapphic stanza are Statius (in Silvae 4.7), Prudentius, Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola and Venantius Fortunatus (once in Carmina 10.7).
Usually, the lesser Sapphic line is found only within the Sapphic stanza; however, both Seneca the Younger (in his Hercules Oetaeus) and Boethius used the line in extended passages (thus resembling the stichic quality of blank verse more than a stanzaic lyric).
Medieval
The Sapphic stanza was one of the few classical quantitative meters to survive into the Middle Ages, when accentual rather than quantitative prosody became the norm. Many Latin hymns were written in Sapphic stanzas, including the famous hymn for John the Baptist which gave the original names of the sol-fa scale: