The passion of love is the supreme subject of Sappho’s songs, as shown by these first two and many a short fragment, as for example (E. 81) where Love is called for the first time in literature “sweet-bitter.” Some scholars have credited it to the much later Posidippus, but he and Meleager took the word from Sappho, though it may not have been original even with her. Sappho’s order of the compound word is generally reversed in translation, but Sir Edwin Arnold says “sweetly bitter, sadly dear,” and Swinburne in _Tristram of Lyonesse_ speaks of “Sweet Love, that are so bitter.” Tennyson also has the same order in _Lancelot and Elaine_ (pp. 205-206). To Sappho love is a second death, and in the second ode death itself seems not very far away. The Greek words for swooning are mostly metaphors from death, and so we are not surprised when we read that like death love relaxes every limb and sweeps one away in its giddy swirling, a sweet-bitter resistless wild beast. Here is Sir Sidney Colvin’s translation (_John Keats_, 1917, p. 332): “Love the limb-loosener, the bitter-sweet torment, the wild beast there is no withstanding, never harried a more helpless victim.” Another fragment (E. 54) also shows the power of love:
Love tossed my heart as the wind That descends on the mountain oaks.
Sappho’s range of subjects is much greater than the personal emotions of love, though very personal and individual feelings predominate. She touches almost every field of human experience, so that there is much in her scant fragments to bring her near to us. The wail against ingratitude comes home to those high-strung natures who do good to others but are sensitive to every wrong when they have the unfortunate experience of learning that one’s friends are sometimes one’s own worst enemies. “Those harm me most by whom I have done well” (Mackail). But she is not one of those who bear a grudge long, her heart is for peace. One of the few ethical fragments, as Mackail says, “is a speech of delicate self-abasement, spoken with the effect of a catch in the voice and tears behind the eyes;” “No rancour in this breast runs wild, I have the heart of a child.” Sappho’s love of sermonizing is seen in her commandment: “when anger swells in the heart, restrain the idly barking tongue.” From Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ Edmonds (91) reconstructs another fragment: