A Poem Is a Seduction

Because, how can you not love Sappho?

Poets write about any subject that takes their fancy, but there’s a reason we reflexively associate poetry with love. Even people who have never written a poem in their lives have probably written a love poem or two. It’s only natural: love is an exalted feeling, poetry is an exalted form.

There’s also something about a poem that encourages the kind of confessions that, were we to blurt them out at the dinner table, would produce, best case scenario, an awkward silence. We can put that down to the inevitable backwash of all that exaltation. That’s the other side of this natural attraction. Love certainly gets us to say and do and feel things that make us cringe or blush or both; and, no matter how you package or intellectualize it, poetry is embarrassing.

The raft of foolish antics love gives rise to, though, is nothing compared with the terrors it unleashes. We fall in love slipping on banana peels but also leaping out of airplanes. No matter how you package or intellectualize it, love is terrifying. Fear, that’s the other big thing love and poetry recognize about each other. Love reaches for poetry because it senses that poetry understands what’s at stake. You need guts of iron to confess your love, and nerves of steel to write a poem. Between the two of them, fear and embarrassment, it makes sense that love and poetry would seek protection as well as comfort in each other’s arms.[1]

Here’s where metaphor comes in. Poetry enlists metaphor to mitigate its own risks, and love takes refuge in poetry for the camouflage its metaphors provide. When you confess your secrets to a poem, it keeps them. It keeps them, but it doesn’t promise that the right reader won’t be able to “break the code.” In fact a good poem promises the reverse, that the right reader will see through that thin “read” line and be conquered. A love poem is a love letter written in cipher, and all poems, wanting nothing so much as to fall into the hands of a sympathetic reader “and dwell in lovers’ eyes,” are love poems. [2]

Indeed, one of the pleasures of reading and writing poetry comes from the fact that it hides the secrets entrusted to it in plain sight. We all know that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Not if it’s a cigar in a poem. This has to do with poems being almost anti-literal-minded. Metaphors are a kind of substitution, but not the sort that set up one-to-one correspondences. They are substitutions that are part of a dynamic process of meaning-making. A cigar in a poem is the poem’s way of asking, Why is a cigar not just a cigar? What is this cigar doing here in this poem? How is it that a cigar can turn into a phallus?

Metaphors are behind what people seem to mean when they talk about the transformative nature of poetry, and art more generally.[3] A love poem doesn’t just tell the poet-lover’s desire, it gives it a voice. It doesn’t merely appeal to the object of desire, it conjures him. The love poem isn’t satisfied to deliver the message of desire, it embodies it, literally giving a form to what it wants and what it wants to happen. In a love poem, desire does not just peek through the grille of the poem; it’s the tree that grille was carved from.

Like love, this transformation does, and doesn’t, happen all at once. It’s sudden. It’s prolonged. It’s cumulative. Words take their places in a sequence that, in turn, finds its unique shape - those words in that order, those lines so disposed. Love poems embody desire and we, the readers of love poems, respond bodily. Our eyes move across the contours of the form laid out along a sheet of paper. We lean forward, hold our breath, flinch at a disclosure like we do at the discovery of a scar. We shiver at the images and memories and desires the images and memories and desires we meet on the page arouse in us. We feel the feeling we have to go to the French to describe, that frisson that to me is a sign that our imagination has shifted out of idle into gear, transporting us where we sit so that we are both here and there. It’s a kind of primitive VR.

Like metaphor and VR, a love poem springs from the absence of the real thing. It’s not only that we can’t logically desire what we already have.[4] The poet writing a love poem is ipso facto not holding, kissing, directly addressing - or undressing - an actual, physical, literal body. The poet is writing “in place of.” The poem is a substitute. Whether the poet-lover has sidestepped a more exposed approach because she is too shy, too afraid of rejection, unable to get the beloved’s attention, or it’s the beloved who is unavailable in any number of ways, it’s only the fact of the beloved’s being “not here” that creates the conditions for the writing of the poem.

To embody is also to contain, which is just as well, since desire can make us feel like Tom Cruise clinging to the landing skids of a helicopter flying over canyons on another side of the world. Whether love civilizes desire or just gussies it up, love poems put the lover behind the wheel. Which reminds me of Robert Lowell, because what I’m trying to explain is pretty close to what he, in a different context, though in a poem, refers to rather simply as “love-cars.”[5]

Lowell had his own idea of what he meant and only you know what a “love-car” evokes for you. For me it’s a vehicle for enshrining and transporting the desires of the heart and a forest-green 1968 Buick Le Sabre parked down a dark stretch of a quiet suburban street with a couple of sixteen years olds in the backseat.[6]

Anyway… here’s one of Sappho’s greatest love-cars.

“The Anactória Poem” by Sappho
 (translated by Jim Powell)[7]

Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it's what-
                    ever you love best.

And it's easy to make this understood by
everyone, for she who surpassed all human
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
                    husband—that best of

men—went sailing off to the shores of Troy and
never spent a thought on her child or loving
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
                    left her to wander,

she forgot them all, she could not remember
anything but longing, and lightly straying
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
                    now: Anactória,

she's not here, and I'd rather see her lovely
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
                    glittering armor.

How can you not love Sappho?

Like almost all of her poems, “The Anactória Poem” has come down to us as a fragment, so any translation is based on reconstructions. If you’ve been reading my posts for a while you may have already guessed that I’m going to turn that hitch if not into an advantage at least into an analogy - every love poem is a translation based on a reconstruction. The poet-lover reconstructs the absent beloved in the image of her own desire, and translates that desire into a seduction: the love letter that is the love poem.

One of the things I love about this love poem is how long it seems to take the speaker to even remember that she’s writing one, let alone to whom.

We’d be forgiven, I think, for assuming as we take in those opening lines that we’ve happened upon a poem about the relative merits of the various branches of the armed forces. It reads almost like a menu: Cavalry? Infantry? Navy? And of course it comes in the form of that noncommittal, even guileless, what-do-I-know “Some say this, some say that.”

Like someone stuck by one of Cupid’s arrows, we’re being ambushed. The point of comparison among the various divisions of the soldiery is not, as we might reasonably have expected, a question of their relative efficacy. It’s, incongruously, their beauty. And not even their relative beauty, because somehow we’ve landed in a world where the only contestants for the most beautiful sight on this dark earth are mounted troops, foot soldiers and sailors.

Just as we’re wondering whatever happened to sunsets over harbors and Claudia Cardinale and Alain Delon circa The Leopard, the speaker steps out of the shadows like a dreamy, lovesick twenty-something year old drifting into a room full of eminently sensible adults to test-drive her latest formulation of the majesty of love, settling the matter with a regal ipse dixit that sweeps the war table clean. It’s the same war table she herself has just assembled, of course, but be that as it may.

Beauty, she announces, is a function of love: “I say [the most beautiful sight this dark earth offers is] what- / ever you love best.” And I can prove it.

Rereading this poem this morning it occurs to me that if Paris (the Trojan prince) had adopted this tactic when called upon to confer his golden apple on the fairest of them all - all in his case being the three most powerful female deities, Aphrodite, Hera and Athena, the goddesses, respectively, of love, marriage and war - a ten-year-long war might have been averted, a civilization preserved and a pair of culturally foundational epics never “written.”[8]

Perhaps this was in the back of Sappho’s mind too because her key witness is Helen, who Paris did in fact love best, and was the content of the bribe (not bride, she was already married) which clinched the title, along with the inedible Golden Delicious, for Aphrodite.

This is the poem’s argument: Helen, the most beautiful human ever, abandoned her husband (who also gets a superlative by the way, “best of // men”), not sparing a thought for her loving parents or her own child[9], to go sailing off to Troy, her mind so addled by (the goddess of) love that it effectively wipes her memory clean of the lot of them, and everything else, apart from the all-consuming “longing” she feels, causing her to wander and, “lightly straying aside,” lose her way.

Hmm.

I get “love/desire is powerful,” “love/desire can be destructive,” even “love/desire messes with your sense of direction.” But every time I try to grab hold of the promised self-evident proof that the most beautiful sight on this dark earth is whatever you love best, I feel like I’m trying to catch one of those fruit flies performing low yo-yos around the kitchen this time of year.

What I do know is that the Helen story is part of Sappho-the-lover’s attempt to grasp what we all find tricky to understand and explain - love, desire, beauty and how they all fit together.

Let’s be clear. I’m not, for a change, talking about metaphors.[10] I’m talking about the perennial challenges that love, et al., pose. I.e., “What makes something or someone beautiful? How is beauty related to desire? How is desire related to love? How do I get something or someone I want? How do I get someone to want me? How do I keep them once I’ve got them? What if they stop wanting me? What if I stop wanting them?” These are some of the conversations we come to poetry to have. With the poems, with the poets, and with ourselves.

One of the things Sappho-the-poet is doing here is letting Sappho-the-speaker-of-the-poem demonstrate the effect love, beauty and desire have on their conquests. Helen is not the only love-dazed creature who’s lost her bearings in this poem. The owner of the face that launched a thousand ships is a pretext, the example Sappho-the-lover “lightly strays into” and then loses her way in because (the goddess of) love has seduced her wits too. She is so distracted by her own desire that she can’t think straight herself.

But even if it doesn’t quite make logical, literal sense, the detour into Helen’s story makes its own sense. Sappho-the-lover is about to take the potentially mortifying, frankly terrifying risk of pouring out her heart. It’s only natural that she would want to set up a diversion.

The introduction of Helen of Troy also makes sense by analogy. Overcome with the beauty of her own heart’s desire and understandably apprehensive at the prospect of proclaiming it, Sappho’s imagination naturally reaches for the prototype of overwhelming beauty and dangerous desirability. A superficial non sequitur on the surface, the Helen digression anticipates the seismic non sequitur that will shortly stop the poem in its tracks:

		    But that reminds me
                    now: Anactória,

	she's not here….

Did you feel it too, the frisson? Suddenly we’re right there with her as she slowly looks up from her story to search the faces of the assembled, as if only just this moment it’s occurred to her to see whether Anactória’s is among them. As if she hadn’t noticed that it isn’t. As if Anactória’s not being “here” isn’t the foremost thought and main preoccupation of her heart and her mind, her body and her soul.

As if.

This is the moment when everything finally starts to fall into place, when we see that she’s been thinking about Anactória all along. That she hasn’t been thinking of anything or anyone but Anactória. And when I say Anactória I am back with my metaphors, because what I mean is the Anactória that is the incomparable beauty Sappho-the-lover desires, a desire that finds its form and expression in this love poem named for that girl.

Now that we’ve gotten to the crux of the poem we can begin to make sense of the opening gambit. The deployment of a glistening host of horsemen, foot soldiers and seamen is Sappho-the-poet’s wry comment on what seems already in the 7th century BC to have been a standard trope about love being a kind of war, a contest in which the lover fends off rivals and conquers (the heart of) the beloved. The troops represent the love that has already taken possession of Sappho-the-lover.[11] They speak to her helplessness in the face of the power of her own feelings: one woman up against an army.

It’s a predicament that is amplified by the cavalry. A human on horseback in a poem represents the internal tussle between our powers of reason (symbolized less than perfectly, granted, by the human holding the reins on top of the horse) and the less reasonable parts - our appetites, impulses and desires (symbolized pretty persuasively by an animal who weighs somewhere in the vicinity of a thousand pounds, can move at speeds approaching 45 miles per hour and, though it could rear and buck and throw us off at any moment, we like to think we have domesticated). [12]

In other words, in a poem a horseman or horsewoman is a version of the mind-body problem, which you could cross-file under the irresistible force paradox. [13]

This is precisely what Sappho-the-poet has Sappho-the-lover enact. It’s why her very compelling argument, which is in fact easy for everyone to understand, also makes no sense. Desire has spit out the bit; the reins hang useless in her hands.

Still, as long as they’re here serving as a metaphor for Sappho-the-lover’s stomping, snorting, strapping desire, the lancers may as well help her convince [14] her reader of her intentions. Thronging or not, sometimes a serviceman on his mount is just a member of the dragoons. But in a poem, one creature astride and/or riding another is not just your workaday hussar. [15]

At the same time, as far as the ritual maneuvers of courtship go, the display of an entire army is something of an extravagant gesture, like twelve dozen roses or John Cusack holding his boombox up over his head under Ione Skye’s window in Say Anything.

It’s impossible not to feel that this show of force also represents a kind of threat. Actually it’s implied as soon as you mention Helen of Troy, the cause of a war that laid waste an entire civilization. Maybe Sappho-the-lover’s desire - if it’s rejected? whether or not it’s consummated? - unlooses some devastating havoc in its wake. Just the fact that the troops have already secured the exits is a way of saying, howsoever archly, Checkmate. Surrounded, the beloved has only one move, and that’s surrender. [16] Insofar as they represent overwhelming deadly force, the military is a deadly serious metaphor.

Although it’s true that we don’t necessarily need to identify the gender of the speaker of the poem with the poet who wrote it, this poem is a special case. And not just because it’s by Sappho, who’s become a lesbian icon.

I’ve talked about how the Helen example doesn’t actually prove the point Sappho-the-lover says she’s trying to make, but it’s weird in other ways as well. In no other ancient version of this myth does a lovestruck Helen buy herself a one-way ticket to Troy, “abandoning her //husband.” According to all the other sources, Paris sails to Sparta and kidnaps her. It’s Sappho-the-poet’s choice to tell the story of Helen’s abduction as the story of Helen’s desire, a stand-in for Sappho-the-lover’s.

This sets up a distinction between the women at the heart of the poem and the men at its periphery. Sappho-the-poet is not necessarily tagging men for expressing their own desire with aggression: some men do, some don’t. Rather, in this poem about beauty, love and desire, we’re invited to read the army as representing the role men have played in the formation of our understanding of all three, how they have been made to fit together.

It is not a natural fact that desire mobilizes an army of military metaphors: metaphors of bellicosity and violence, of fortifications besieged and territories seized, of combat, capture, conquest, dominion and defeat. Like armies, metaphors have to be formed. The trope of desire as an impulse most persuasively expressed as a military campaign comes from the experiences of those who have raised armies and fought battles. It is a crusade justified by love, inspired and incited by beauty.

And it isn’t just desire. It’s the shape of thought, the way thought is fashioned by the experiences of those who hold and wield power. Sappho’s army is a symbol of the kind of political power that fights wars over the possession of one beautiful, desirable woman. It just so happens that the rules and conventions of desire, no less than those of geopolitics (and poetry too, while we’re at it) were established and codified and are to this day defended by men.

In recognition of the power and preeminence of male desire, Sappho’s army stands at the perimeter of the poem. Her desire is surrounded by an entire arsenal. It’s not just one horse or one sword, spear, arrow or cannon. And none of them is just a cigar.

None of this is news. It’s what “The Anactória Poem” does with these prevailing power structures, in addition to engaging their services. It reduces these power structures to a matter of opinion. Sure, it says, the standard contours of desire, like those of beauty and love, have been forged by men, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other, equally seductive forms: I say that my desire is the most beautiful, and the most powerful. As beautiful as the most beautiful woman who ever lived. As powerful as any army. [17]

Though we don’t know whether Sappho-the-lover gets the girl, Sappho-the-poet gets to have her cake and eat it, too. Standing behind her conceit of having “forgotten” all about Anactória, the metaphoric military presence is there to protect Sappho-the-lover as she lays it all on the line in the final stanza (or at least the last one we have). They are there to hold that line against love’s own fearsome regiments - fear of abandonment, of confusion, of losing one’s way, of losing one’s self, of being lightly toyed with, of ending up broken and bloodied. There’s no one on this dark earth who doesn’t recognize the necessity of a bulwark against these forces. We’ve all been there. We all know.

And yet, they’re there and they’re not there. Having mustered an army to help her construct and defend her own desire, Sappho-the-lover no longer has any use for them. When she finally professes her love, she disbands them:

		… I’d rather see her lovely
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
                    glittering armor.

In the poem’s coup de grace, Anactória, she who holds the ultimate power to conquer Sappho-the-lover’s fears and sweep away her defenses, breezily defeats the army lock, stock and cigarillos.

But of course you don’t go telling the person who holds all this power over you just how powerful they are, do you? You find a more flattering word:

			    but I say … the most beautiful 
of sights the dark earth offers is whatever 
you love best…

It’s a simple tautology. Love is a function of beauty, beauty is a function of love. In the long run, it may not be enough to take in the sight of whatever it is your heart desires but, like love and beauty themselves, whatever comes next is perhaps best understood as a gift.

How can you not love Sappho?