Sapphic stanza

The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse 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 or adonean line).

Using "-" for a long syllable, "u" for a short and "x" for an "anceps" (or free syllable):

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

While Sappho used several metrical forms 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 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 contemporary and countryman, Alcaeus of Mytilene, also used the Sapphic stanza.

A few centuries later, the Roman poet Catullus admired Sappho's work and used the Sapphic meter in two poems, Catullus 11 and Catullus 51. The latter is a rough translation of Sappho 31. Sapphics were also used by Horace 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 man who is upright in life and free
 * of wickedness, he needs no Moorish spears
 * nor bow nor quiver heavy with envenomed
 * arrows, Fuscus...)

The Sapphic stanza was imitated in English by Algernon Charles Swinburne 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 wrote a fine tribute to William Shakespeare 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 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 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,
 * (If things eternal may be like these earthly)
 * 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!