Contrast of Imagery

In ‘To Her You Were Like a Visible Goddess’ is about love, either lost or unrequited as all the reader knows is that the female character is in extreme grief over this lost lover. The does not describe her facial expressions or actions, but by presents a series of images that promise happiness and then contrasting it with the woman’s emotional state to demonstrate the turbulent depths of her emotions. The woman is “as conspicuous among Lydian women as the rose-tipped moon/ surpasses all the stars” emphasizes her grief. The moon is an appropriate metaphor to symbolize her despair as compared to the other Lydian women, who the reader can assume are at bliss and in love with no unfortunate mishaps yet to occur in their romantic lives. The moon can be considered the shadow of the sun’s light (sometime form eclipses), blocking natural rays of sunshine and causing shadows and nighttime to fall. Such reference can therefore represent the woman’s fear and darkness in her heart after losing her love. The ‘stars’ on the other hand, are in multitude and stars are often used as a backdrop in many romantic settings. The moon and stars metaphors used to illustrate the stark difference in the emotion and situation of the woman’s love.

Then Sappho shifts onto describing images that hold a promise of beauty and life, with imagery such as “roses bloom, and tender parsley and honey-flowered clover”. Then Sappho again changes the focus of the scenes onto how the woman’s mourning has caused her “spirit wasted with yearning, heart consumed with pain”. Those two images are again used like the stars and moon reference as a way to highlight her depression. This shows how the woman no longer considers herself as a functioning unit of the world, as with the lines presented one scene is depicting external beauty and the next one showing the woman’s internal anguish. The roses, parsley and clover are an art of the natural world, where life moves in a direction of growth, death, and rebirth, as it is the cycle of how life is maintained. The women, however, is stuck in this debilitated stage where she can no longer move forward, she is immobile and by refusing to recover from her emotional trauma, causing her life force to decay from her pain and misery.