The Work of Love and Sappho’s Poetry
In the English language, I find the word love to be one of its most frustrating, most infuriating, and most dynamic words. The connection between two physically, emotionally, and communally intimate people? Love. The connection of parent to child, sibling to sibling? Love. A homosocial relationship of two people who hang out at the bar Saturday evenings to watch the game, show up to the same church on Sunday, and help each other with yard work on Wednesday? Love. The gift of God for the eternal life of his children? Love.
The other far-reaching word that I find frustrating is work. One performs work, one does work, one hates work, one works. To get B, one must work by doing A; or, one must work A to get B. Work, like love, is a word that has use for different tasks. One might call digging a hole work, while a child or dog calls it fun. One might consider writing work, while one like me considers it enjoyable.
The two words in connection have an intimate connection to each other, especially when one loves their work (like I do my writing) or works to find their love (in thinking especially about how Jacob work for Laban, or really any effort one performs in a society to establish intimate love between two people or familial love within a homestead). In between work and love, I find a sticky connection, desire (especially when using sticky like how Elizabeth Freeman does in Time Binds). To look at these two terms, along with the interlocutor of desire, I turn to the poetry of Sappho.
Sappho was an ancient Greek poet who specialized in love poetry. Born on the isle of Lesbos around 630 BCE, she is the inspiration, muse, and poetess of many sapphic and lesbian voices. Her heart yearns and her words echo across the sagas of time to speak from spirit to spirit, love to love.
Love and Work
In Sappho's poetry, I found a marked connection between one loving someone else and one putting in the work to love someone else. In "Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind," the goddess must do work herself in order for love, of which she is patron, to be enacted. Instead of simply observing the love beneath Mount Olympus, Aphrodite "left your father's golden house and came." Love is not simply something observed; in order for it to be observed, it must be felt, engaged with, acted upon. Hence why Aphrodite did not stay at her father's golden house, but instead came down from the mountain.
Desire
Yet there is a fundamental desire that yokes work and love. When the "You" in "You came and I was longing for you" comes, the narrator is longing. When the desire and the work intertwine, that is when the next line, "You cooled my heart burning with desire," mixes both fire and ice, searing desire and cooling coitus. Desire, longing, is a feeling that leads to, recognizes, and subsumes the work into it; one cannot work without desire, but one can desire without work.
For example, in another poem, the narrator states that "I cannot weave on the loom, for I am overcome with desire for a boy." This desire inhibits work—or at least, inhibits work that is not the work of love. The emphasis on the desire overcoming the weaving—weaving itself being a task, not a work of love—shows us that the work within love, the work that love requires, is different than other forms of work. It is not a to-do list one can check off nor a task that can be delegated; it is a unique action that must be driven by desire.
The Communal Work of Love
Yet within Sappho's poetry, the work, the desire, the love is not done alone. It is performed between people, but it is also a communal work scaffolded by the people around those in love and not just between those in love. For example, when Aphrodite comes down from her father's golden house, she does not walk or climb down; instead, "fine birds brought you" ("Deathless Aphrodite of the spangled mind"). The narrator of this poem ends it by requesting Aphrodite to "be my ally," enveloping more than just the narrator and the one(s) the narrator loves into this communal work of love.
In "Come close to me, I pray," the narrator recognizes the help by which a voyage occurs: "they called on you and Zeus the god of suppliants and Thyone's lovely child." From this help, the narrator requests, "So now be kind and help me too, as in ancient days." Help me, the cry goes out, for I am in love and I cannot love someone by myself alone. The work that love requires must be performed by those in love, but surrounding them, the community can inhibit that work or encourage it to fruition.
Although work and love are words with multiple meanings in the English language, they provide us with a chance to understand, through Sappho's poetry, that to love another being we must work for it and have the community around us behind us, working toward love as the culmination of all things. While this does not answer one of the key questions that I ask a lot—what is love (or, in this instance, should love be the culmination of all things?)—it does set us with a groundwork that love requires a community working together.
I am currently on a quest to read three different Norton Anthology series from front to back (World Literature, American Literature, and British Literature). As I read them, I like to engage with my reading by writing about it.
Since this is a blog, the musings on the literature will by no means be a deep scholarly engagement; rather, these posts are more like reader reactions. I set a timer for 30 minutes, write, and see what I think about what I’ve read.
