Loughran+10.21.09


 * Wednesday, October 21, 2009**

Today we spent the first few minutes of class discussing the mid-term exam, the topics we wrote about and how we felt we did. Then we discussed the poetry of Sappho of Lesbos.

First we talked about the differences between Epoch and Lyrical poetry. Since epoch poetry is long and drawn out while lyrical poetry is short and flowing, we consider Sappho's poetry lyrical.
 * Sappho of Lesbos**

We reviewed the poem [Deathless Aphrodite of the Spangled Mind] and discovered that Sappho is discribing a female-female relationship. At the time these poems were written female-female relationships, whether they were sexual or platonic, were completely socially acceptable.

We defined **exegesis** and the dictionary.com definition is "the critical explanation or interpretation of a text or portion of a text, esp. of the Bible."

We also learned that the poem was written in a form called **sapphic-strophe** which is written with three lines long, one line short, and no ending punctuation. There is no ending punctuation because it forces the reader to **rove-over** the whole poem which is when the poem is read continuously almost in one breath to create the feeling of passion.

Then we interpreted the poem as the following: First the speaker asks Aphrodite about her lost love, begging her not to break her heart, but to hear her prayers. She then presumes that the gods are wondering what she is asking for and why she is calling on them again. Then there is a question mark that shows a break in the sapphic-strophe and change in thought and perhaps an answer to her question. Then in the sixth stanza there are six times that the pronoun "she" is used to represent three different female characters who i believe to be the speaker, her lover, and Aphrodite. I'm having some trouble interpreting the end but i think she's asking Aphrodite a final time to be her ally and help her to accomplish the things her hear longs for, which we already know is to find her love.
 * Interpreting [Deathless Aphrodite of the Spangled Mind]**