In “Ode to Aphrodite” by Sapho, the author uses structure, tone, imagery, diction, and shifts to express the speaker’s insatiable love for a woman in a poem which should win our class’s “March Madness Poem” competition.
“Ode to Aphrodite” follows the structure of similar to a Homeric Hymn. In the first line the speaker “invokes” a prayer with Aphrodite by calling upon her name and provides attributes of her character, then a “mythic”1 section, a free-form middle section, but, what is missing from Sapho’s poem, is a stable and fulfilled conclusion. This creates the emersion as if the reader where a bystander watching a woman plead with Aphrodite to permit some third-party to fall in love with themselves.
“Ode to Aphrodite” has a very desperate and unsatisfied tone from Sapho in it. She does this in three ways: word choice, imagery, and the modification of the Homeric structure. Her choice of words, such as “Golden House in pity” (Sapho, 9), “this mad heart” (Sapho, 18), and the entirety of the last stanza, create both vivid imagery of pleading and a tone of desperation and unsatisfication. Additionality, her modification of the standard structure of the Homeric Hymn also conveys her tone, by substituting what would be a conclusion with thanks and praise Sapho’s speaker instead continues to plead requesting for Aphrodite to “come again to me” (Sapho, 25).
Finally, Sapho uses shifts to provide depth to “Ode to Aphrodite,” the two most apparent being at the begining and the end. This first shift occurs when she hears Aphrodite’s voice, Sapho begins to use more hopeful language, in fact this is the only point in the poem where she describes what it is she wants from Aphrodite: for a woman she loves to reciprocate those feelings. Although, at the end of the stanza, she trails of sensing a lack of Aphrodite’s presence and then, in the next, returns to pleading for Aphrodite, and her hope of love, to return to her.
Sapho’s poem “Ode to Aphrodite” should win the “March Madness Poem” competition for it’s use of Homeric structure, descriptive word choice, vivid imagery, and deep shifts. The poem profoundly capture’s Sapho’s feelings and yearning for love, and consider: one of the first known sad lesbian poems.