I have read this poem a score of times, in Greek, in the Latin version of Catullus, and in English, German, and French translations.  The more I read it and compare with it the eulogies just quoted, the more I marvel at the power of cant and conventionality in criticism and opinion, and at the amazing current ignorance in regard to the psychology of love and of the emotions in general.  I have made a long and minute study of the symptoms of love, in myself and in others; I have found that the torments of doubt and the loss of sleep may make a lover “paler than grass”; that his heart is apt to “flutter in his bosom,” and his tongue to be embarrassed in presence of the beloved; but when Sappho speaks of a lover bathed in sweat, of becoming blind, deaf, and dumb, trembling all over, and little better than one dead, she indulges in exaggeration which is neither true to life nor poetic.

An amusing experiment may be made with reference to this famous poem.  Suppose you say to a friend: 

“A woman was walking in the woods when she saw something that made her turn pale as a sheet; her heart fluttered, her ears rang, her tongue was paralyzed, a cold sweat covered her, she trembled all over and looked as if she would faint and die:  what did she see?”

The chances are ten to one that your friend will answer “a bear!” In truth, Sappho’s famous “symptoms of love” are laughably like the symptoms of fear which we find described in the books of Bain, Darwin, Mosso, and others—­“a cold sweat,” “deadly pallor,” “voice becoming husky or failing altogether,” “heart beating violently,” “dizziness which will blind him,” “trembling of all the muscles of the body,” “a fainting fit.”  Nor is fear the only emotion that can produce these symptoms.  Almost any strong passion, anger, extreme agony or joy, may cause them; so that what Sappho described was not love in particular, but the physiologic effects of violent emotions in general.  I am glad that the Greek physician who copied her poem into his book of diagnoses is not my family doctor.

Sappho’s love-poems are not psychologic but purely physiologic.  Of the imaginative, sentimental, esthetic, moral, altruistic, sympathetic, affectional symptoms of what we know as romantic love they do not give us the faintest hint.  Hegel remarked truly that “in the odes of Sappho the language of love rises indeed to the point of lyrical inspiration, yet what she reveals is rather the slow consuming flame of the blood than the inwardness of the subjective heart and soul.”  Nor was Byron deceived:  “I don’t think Sappho’s ode a good example.”  The historian Bender had an inkling of the truth when he wrote (183):