Critical responses to the poem have varied widely. I survey here the most recent and informed readings in an effort to provide a starting point for my own investigation. The unfolding of past response demonstrates the need for my study, for previous readers have left many questions about the poem unanswered simply through the approaches they have taken. These questions provide a background for my inquiry and place it in a frame of reference, so that my own attempt to explore the poem may establish itself partly through its differences from what has gone before.

Denys Page, in Sappho and Alcaeus, views the poem as the expression of Sappho’s will. His emphasis lies on the reasons behind the words. Page adeptly teases out the intention of various images—why the poet has Aphrodite smile, for example. [1] His emphasis on intention, though, leads him to try to find reasons for features of the poem he clearly believes are illogical, for instance why Sappho uses so many words on the “irrelevant” detail of the epiphany. [2] Such a perspective certainly provides the reader with much learned insight into the possible denotations of the words, and even into the possible tone and attitude of Sappho towards her work and towards her audience, for these are the forces which Page sees as the reasons for her use of language. The reader, {5|6} however, comes away from the commentary and interpretation wondering whether Page has, in the end, captured the essence of the poem.

Page’s first words of interpretation indicate that he thinks the poem turns upon two revelations of meaning. I quote his first sentence in full as an example of his whole perspective:

These two elements which Page chooses to emphasize represent, I agree, important moments of the poem, and Page elucidates them. It is, however, indicative of his approach that he begins with and points up these places and does not treat of the poem’s ritual elements, the hymnic epithets and ritual forms of prayer, until the middle of his interpretation, when he dismisses them as the “traditional and stately form” which Sappho “impose[s]” on a “wholly personal matter.” [4]

For contrast’s sake we should note that the poem itself follows the opposite configuration: Sappho begins by invoking the goddess and praying Aphrodite not to subdue her. In the course of the supplication, she calls up an image of the goddess speaking to her, who then says the things Page finds so instructive. I submit that Page’s analysis, in flouting the supplicatory nature of the poem which I just noted and will explore in more detail later, shows an insensitivity to the very reasons he seems to seek. Although his insights into the poem allow us to penetrate more deeply the “meaning” and “spirit” he proposes to explore, Page leaves untouched questions he raises about the poetic effect of the ritual form he says Sappho has imposed. We must ask, does not the form determine the nature and meaning of the poem it forms? Also, does not the form have a significance of its own? {6|7}

Bruno Gentili would answer both of these questions with a resounding Yes. At the heart of his Poetry and its Public in Ancient Greece is a concern with the fundamentally occasional nature of Greek poetry. [5] His reading of Sappho 1 is a good example. “It is begging the question,” he writes, differing fundamentally and explicitly with Page, “to say that [such prayers] were purely literary, and not in keeping with what we know about the preeminent role that the cult of the divinity played in archaic communities.” [6] For Gentili the poem “must also mirror a precise ceremonial” [7] in addition to any “literary” significance the words have. Gentili’s perspective seems promisingly heterodox in that it seems to incorporate both the concrete occasion of the poem and the more abstract “literary” functions of the language.

Yet Gentili in reality traps himself into a wholly occasional interpretation of the poem simply in the way he regards his claim that the function of the poem is not “purely literary.” The extension of this claim, that of the “precise ceremonial,” forces the poem into a realm of language where each element of a poem must correspond to one and only one element of a ritual. Aphrodite’s smile, with which Page beguiled us, must represent not a poetic gesture but solely a cult trope for depicting the goddess. In this conception of language as ritual, the poem is no longer a poem but an extension of the ritual. Because it “must mirror a precise ceremonial,” it cannot look outward, but only at its reflection. [8] An evocative epithet like δολόπλοκε becomes nothing more than a ritual label of the subsequent Ἀφρόδιτα, which in turn becomes the pale reflection of the cult’s conception of the goddess. The poem, for Gentili, has no meaning other than as part of the ritual. With the mirror of the poem, the poem-ritual unit becomes infinitely self-{7|8}reflective, intensively oriented towards itself. Since the entire poem—epithets like ποικιλόθρονε and δολόπλοκε, the remembered epiphany of the goddess in her chariot drawn by sparrows, Aphrodite’s very words—reflects the cult worship of the goddess, it has no force outside of that worship, if we follow Gentili’s logic. It is possible to read the resulting unit of the poem and the ritual as a text, and in some ways I will proceed to do so, but Gentili does not see any significance in that text, probably because he finds it “purely literary.” After he makes his claim for the occasional nature of the poem and proposes the theory that the occasion was an attempt to win back a member of Sappho’s circle who had deserted her, [9] he must leave the poem, for it offers no further insight into its power or its effect. The most telling facet of this reading is that for Gentili Sappho 1 represents a way to advance his theories on the thíasos. His interpretation from that perspective occurs wholly from without, as he makes of the poem a closed, self-reflecting structure. Using Sappho’s words to illustrate his study of the public, he leaves himself no room to illustrate the poetry.

Anne Burnett proposes in the introduction to Three Archaic Poets to provide a happy medium, a meeting point between the two camps which I have above represented in Page and Gentili. Her discussion of the “cri du coeur school” and the “occasional school” reflects in part the concerns I outlined above, the problems with too intensive a set on either of the two. [10] Such a hybrid prospect, like Gentili’s, seems promising at the outset When Burnett applies her hybrid view to Sappho 1, however, the result is not a complete, satisfactory reading of the poem but a mix of interpretation from the two schools which offers perhaps more comprehension but certainly less incisiveness than either of the other two readings. Burnett concerns herself with determining the character of Sappho’s voice, and she seems to vacillate between the two extremes in order to do so. In the course of the vacillation she offers many insights, but her conception of the poem, {8|9} in the end, is not unified enough to offer a definite answer to the questions she poses. Consider the prime example, on which the reading turns: “And so in the end, though it is not an implement of cult, neither is this a purely secular song; instead, it is a thing rare among the Greeks, the poetic expression of a personal religious faith.” [11] Even besides the obvious attempt to create a traditional cri du coeur reading with the trappings of occasion—the “thing rare among the Greeks” must immediately be suspect for any occasionalist—Burnett clearly would like to keep both schools in force without synthesizing them. “The poetic expression of a personal religious faith” is a neat way to tie the two sides up into one bundle, but Burnett does not deal in any way with the effects each must certainly have on the other when they are brought into such close contact. Instead she moves from point to point in an apparent attempt to illuminate (much as Page tried to do) the various decisions Sappho made for her poem: the new epithets she coined for the occasion, [12] how exactly she chose to differ from the norm of a cultic hymn, [13] why she chose to use concrete detail in the epiphany. [14]

The view of the poem with which Burnett provides us is deceptively unified; it documents eloquently some of the striking characteristics of the poem and explicates separately the “poetic” and “religious” elements, but the joining of the two is too neat. Burnett herself seems to realize this problem, for simple reductions like “Aphrodite is now caught in the trap of her own undeniable past activities: she must be kind again” [15] are inevitably subverted by darker insights into the real complexity like “What epiphanies she saw are her own affair, not ours.” [16] Out of this second strain of analysis, where Burnett seems to recognize the inadequacy of her more pat interpretations, arises a fruitful emphasis on persuasion and memory—Sappho’s persuasion of Aphrodite and {9|10} Aphrodite’s prospective persuasion of the sought-after lover, both persuasions contrived through the memory of past aid and past experience of love. [17] For Burnett, persuasion is the aim of both the actors in the poem, and to that end their language works. Here I would agree, but I would also submit that Burnett does not really investigate the interaction between the elements of the poem she tries to harmonize.

The survey of the three critics exposes the elements of the poem which play the most important roles without defining those roles or their interaction. From this point my study will attempt to explore the areas which I think have been ignored and thus try to produce a new, illuminating reading of the poem. I begin where I think previous readers left the most room for further exploration: the nature of the ritual, prayer elements of the poem. These elements seem to me the fundamental motive of the poem.

It is obvious at the start that the poem is a prayer. Sappho begins, after all, ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ Ἀφρόδιτα / παῖ Δίος δολόπλοκε λίσσομαι σε. The temptation for the critic is then to shy away from what can be seen less disturbingly as an “imposed” form, and to move on without further questioning the poem’s ritual nature. The best way to express the question I now ask of that nature is: How much of a prayer is the poem? The best way to illustrate and explore the essential presence of “real” prayer in the poem is through the type of language which invokes it. {10|11}