The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...

, is an Aeolic verse

Aeolic verse

Aeolic verse is a classification of Ancient Greek lyric poetry referring to the distinct verse forms characteristic of the two great poets of Archaic Lesbos, Sappho and Alcaeus, who composed in their native Aeolic dialect...

 form spanning four lines (more properly three, in the poetry of Sappho and Alcaeus, where there is no word-end before the final Adonean).

The form is two hendecasyllabic verses, and a third verse beginning the same way and continuing with five additional syllables (given as the stanza's fourth verse in ancient and modern editions, and known as the Adonic

Adonic

An adonic is a unit of Aeolic verse, a five-syllable metrical foot consisting of a dactyl followed by a trochee. The last line of a Sapphic stanza is an adonic.- External links :*...

 or adonean line).

Using "-" for a long syllable, "u" for a short and "x" for an "anceps

Anceps

In Greek and Latin meter, an anceps syllable is a syllable in a metrical line which can be either short or long. An anceps syllable may be called "free" or "irrational" depending on the type of meter being discussed....

" (or free syllable):

- u - x - u u - u - -
- u - x - u u - u - -
- u - x - u u - u - -
- u u - u

While Sappho

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...

 used several metrical forms

Meter (poetry)

In poetry, metre is the basic rhythmic structure of a verse or lines in verse. Many traditional verse forms prescribe a specific verse metre, or a certain set of metres alternating in a particular order. The study of metres and forms of versification is known as prosody...

 for her poetry, she is most famous for the Sapphic stanza. Her poems in this meter (collected in Book I of the ancient edition) ran to 330 stanzas, a significant part of her complete works (and of her surviving poetry: fragments 1-42). It is not clear if she created it or if it was already part of the Aeolic

Aeolic Greek

Aeolic Greek is a linguistic term used to describe a set of dialects of Ancient Greek spoken mainly in Boeotia , Thessaly, and in the Aegean island of Lesbos and the Greek colonies of Asia Minor ....

 tradition; according to Marius Victorinus (Ars grammatica 6.161 Keil), it was invented by Alcaeus but then used more frequently by, and so more strongly associated with, Sappho.

Use by other poets

Sappho's

Sappho

Sappho was an Ancient Greek poet, born on the island of Lesbos. Later Greeks included her in the list of nine lyric poets. Her birth was sometime between 630 and 612 BC, and it is said that she died around 570 BC, but little is known for certain about her life...

 contemporary and countryman, Alcaeus of Mytilene, also used the Sapphic stanza.

A few centuries later, the Roman

Ancient Rome

Ancient Rome was a thriving civilization that grew on the Italian Peninsula as early as the 8th century BC. Located along the Mediterranean Sea and centered on the city of Rome, it expanded to one of the largest empires in the ancient world....

 poet Catullus

Catullus

Gaius Valerius Catullus was a Latin poet of the Republican period. His surviving works are still read widely, and continue to influence poetry and other forms of art.-Biography:...

 admired Sappho's work and used the Sapphic meter in two poems, Catullus 11 and Catullus 51

Catullus 51

Catullus 51 is a poem by the Roman famous love poet Gaius Valerius Catullus . It is an adaptation of one of Sappho's fragmentary lyric poems, Sappho 31. Catullus replaces Sappho's beloved with his own beloved Lesbia. Unlike the majority of Catullus' poems, the meter of this poem is the sapphic...

. The latter is a rough translation of Sappho 31

Sappho 31

Sappho 31 is a poem by Ancient Greek poet Sappho of Lesbos. It is also known as phainetai moi after the opening words of its first line, or Lobel-Page 31, Voigt 31, Gallavotti 2, Diehl 2, Bergk 2, after the location of the poem in various editions containing the collected works of Sappho...

. Sapphics were also used by Horace

Horace

Quintus Horatius Flaccus , known in the English-speaking world as Horace, was the leading Roman lyric poet during the time of Augustus.-Life:...

 in several of his Odes, including Ode 1.22:

Integer uitae scelerisque purus

non eget Mauris iaculis neque arcu

nec uenenatis grauida sagittis,

Fusce, pharetra...

The Sapphic stanza was imitated in English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 by Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne

Algernon Charles Swinburne was an English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic. He invented the roundel form, wrote several novels, and contributed to the famous Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica...

 in a poem he simply called Sapphics:

So the goddess fled from her place, with awful

Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;

While behind a clamour of singing women

Severed the twilight.

Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling

Joseph Rudyard Kipling was an English poet, short-story writer, and novelist chiefly remembered for his celebration of British imperialism, tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. Kipling received the 1907 Nobel Prize for Literature...

 wrote a fine tribute to William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

 in Sapphics called "The Craftsman", beginning:

Once, after long-drawn revel at The Mermaid,

He to the overbearing Boanerges

Jonson, uttered (if half of it were liquor

Blessed be the vintage!)

Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...

 also experimented with the form:

Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet mouthed

under Boulder coverlets winter springtime

hug me naked laughing & telling girl friends

gossip til autumn

Isaac Watts

Isaac Watts

Isaac Watts was an English hymnwriter, theologian and logician. A prolific and popular hymnwriter, he was recognised as the "Father of English Hymnody", credited with some 750 hymns...

penned "The Day of Judgment" subtitled An Ode Attempted in English Sapphic (here are the third and fourth stanzas):

Such shall the noise be and the wild disorder,

Such the dire terror, when the great Archangel

Shakes the creation,

Tears the strong pillars of the vault of heaven,

Breaks up old marble, the repose of princes;

See the graves open, and the bones arising,

Flames all around 'em!

External links

• http://www.aoidoi.org/articles/meter/intro.pdf
• http://www.dl.ket.org/latinlit/carmina/scansion/metersofcat.htm