It is my personal belief, from the research I have done and from what I have found out about life in that period, that she was not lesbian, that in those days it was common to have that kind of relationship with members of the same sex and not be labelled a homosexual. Perhaps though, for narrow-minded people it is easier to see her as a lesbian, as it makes her poetry so much easier to understand. If she were lesbian, no one would need to look for a closer or deeper meaning to her poetry. It would be a matter of simply looking at the poems and labelling them without having to look for any other explanation. My belief however, as a female myself, is that females are able to feel very deeply, that it is possible for Sappho to have loved these women, but as a healthy friendly love, something like very close best friend's share today, not as a homosexual one.
No much of Sappho's full poetry remains, only 16 lines of a poems entitled "Hymn To Aphrodite". There are conflicting ideas on whether or not this is a full poem that has survived or whether it is just yet another fragment. Again no one is sure exactly how many fragments of her work are left. So how does this understanding of Sappho's life affect my understanding of her poetry?.
With so little of her poetry left this is a hard question to answer. As there are only scraps of the original poem it is up to me to try and work out where the poem was headed. In the remaining fragments a common feature emerges. The emotions of love, desire, longing present themselves each fragment. Along with them the suffering of lost love is coupled into the poem. Fragment 31 is a good example of the passionate love shown between Sappho and her friends. Here are two stanza's from the fragment :.
"My tongue grows numb; at once.
a subtle fire runs stealthily beneath my skin:.
my eyes see nothing, my ears ring and buzz,.
the sweat pours down, a trembling seizes the whole of me.
