LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Sappho: Love
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In poem 1, the only complete poem, the female speaker "Sappho"prays that Aphrodite, goddess of love, will spare her heartbreak by making the woman she desires return her feelings. In fact, Sappho composed a large number of homoerotic poems, and these in particular have generated much interest in the last twenty years. Sappho’s poems in general evoke the senses and strong emotions such as desire, joy, grief, and longing. She achieves an incantatory effect by playing with sound, using alliteration, assonance, rhythm and word repetition. Anne Carson incorporates such effects in her translation of fr. 112, addressed to a bridegroom:
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In at least two of her poems, Sappho uses ritual description as a metaphor, employing a similar scene of young womyn around an altar. The first tells of an altar of love:
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Sappho was said to have died by throwing herself off a cliff, over the love of a man named Phaon or Fawn. Some say that this is quite obviously made up as a way of asserting Sappho’s heterosexuality. As there is no evidence of her marriage, and no record of the man Fawn, the facts around this remain in doubt. One suggestion is that Sappho being in love with ‘Fawn’ is allegorical. Fawn is the name of a spirit who is the pet of Aphrodite, the goddess of love. So saying that Sappho is in love with Fawn is like saying that Sappho is in love with being in love.
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Sappho was married to Cercylas, a wealthy man from the island of Andrus , and had a daughter named Cleis. She became so popular in her time that the city of Syracuse built a statue to honor her when she visited. In ancient and medieval times she was more famous for (according to legend) throwing herself off a cliff due to unrequited love for a male sailor name Phaon. This legend dates to Ovid and Lucian in Ancient Rome.
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[W]ith this evolution into legend, Sappho became successively recast -both celebrated and vilified- and her life and love was retold to spare patriarchal sensitivities. By the Roman age, Sappho had been relegated to mere heterosexuality, and attributed an obsession with a young boy known as Phaon. When her affections were spurned, according to this tale, she leapt to her death off the White Rocks of Leukas. It is relevant to note that this plot device is still a favourite one of modern filmmakers, who have a tendency to kill their homosexual characters with alarming frequency. The story of Phaon is widely regarded as apocryphal, since the mythical Phaon appears in other similar legends. In one incident he was the lover of Aphrodite; while Aphrodite was herself said to have leapt from the White Rocks of Leukas for the love of a young man, in this case the golden youth Adonis.
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Sappho was reported to have been married, but scholars became suspicious when they translated the name of her "husband" as something like "prick-boy". Apparently she had a daughter. She was ... supposed to have hurled herself off a cliff into the sea (playing her poet's lyre all the while) out of unrequited love for some guy, but that's folklore.
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