Sappho’s Timeless Elegy for Heartbreak at the End of Love, Reimagined in a Haunting Choral Invocation

“Rejoice, go and remember me.”

A sole voice rises from antiquity, cuts through the long silencing and erasure of women, cuts through the Ancient Greek tradition of heroic poetry about war and worldly valor, to sing to us in her soulful authoritative voice a new kind of poetry — the personal, consummately intimate poetry of the inner world, the poetry of passionate love and heartbreak, of longing and loss, of the rapture of the natural world — a sensibility that would come to color everything fr...