Phrontisterion: Sappho's "A Girl’s Lament."

~by David Aiken~


Sappho

It is an ancient Greek poem of only two lines… so, very clipped. Or perhaps it really is just a poetic fragment. Also, it has no title of its own. One source, attributing the lines to Sappho, calls it, “The Deserted Lover: A Girl’s Lament.”* Another translator christened it “Loneliness.” A third simply left it as it was found, nameless. Some scholars think these lines, or this poem fragment, should be attributed to Sappho; others not. Which means that because the poem has already been assimilated into the Sapphic worldview, and has been since first published in 1554 as the first part of the Poems of Sappho, it will probably remain indefinitely ‘guilty by association’. However, the poem is its own self-contained event with a completely intact poetico-philosophical environment; so, it is not a philosophical fragment, by any stretch of the imagination. What one discovers, then, is that what gives an orphaned text its meaning is the surrounding worldview imagined, and mostly created, by the interpreters of ancient texts, rather than the text itself, which has managed to slip its historical anchors.

Below are two different renderings of the poem that interest us.

(#1), Loneliness

Set are the Pleiades; the Moon is down
And midnight dark on high.
The hours, the hours, drift by,
And here I lie,
Alone

(#2), Untitled

The sinking moon has left the sky,

The Pleiades have also gone.

Midnight comes—and goes, the hours fly

And solitary still, I lie.

(Cox; Fragm. adesp. 976 Page)

§ Hephaestion. Our poem-of-interest is not formally attributed to Sappho in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG), which is the digital library for Greek literature. Rather, it is recorded for posterity only in Hephaestion’s textbook, which is called Enchiridion de metris (A Handbook on Meter). In context, Hephaestion selected these lines to illustrate a certain Greek metrical usage called ‘Greater Ionic’, or ionic a maiore. But our education becomes a shade more well-rounded by consulting an online-source that informs us that in the world of prosody—which is to say, of or pertaining to rhythm (stress) and sound (intonation) in language, Greater Ionic uses a metrical foot consisting “of two long followed by two short syllables,” (— — ^‿^‿) while Lesser Ionic uses “two short followed by two long syllables.” (^‿^‿ — —). Shorter is definitely better with this type of education.

Studying Hephaestion’s grammar of Greek meter in the day must certainly have been a riveting and satisfying experience for young writers and scholars of that period. But, if truth be told: this rigmarole about metrical feet and scansions is probably the real reason why the poor girl of our poem was lamenting! Ennui by association!

Any informational digression on Hephaestion at this point will not be a lengthy business, because nobody really seems to know much of anything about this 2^nd century AD Greek grammarian from Alexandria. Wiki-sources inform us that Hephaestion plied his tortuous trade ‘in the age of the Antonines’, by which historians of the Roman Empire generally mean the period between 138 and 192 AD, which includes the rulers Antoninus Pius, Marcus Aurelius, Lucius Verus, and Commodus. This means that, against the backdrop of imperial adoptions and wars and assassinations, Hephaestion’s grammar students were busily packing up their verses laden with iambs and trochees, and hoofing it hurriedly almost anywhere else. Hephaestion leaves behind for posterity the following works:

· Enchiridion de Metris

· On Confusions in Poems

· Poemata

· Solutions in Tragedy

· Solutions to Difficulties in Comedy

Red Krater/Sappho

§ Sappho. A further digression at this point, concerning the poetess Sappho (ca. 630-570 BC), would also not be misplaced, because following the extremely scanty historical evidence, but wanting nevertheless to comply with Hercule Poirot’s injunction to ‘chercher la femme’, it may well turn out that this best-known of all Greek women poets has yet some connection with the text of our poem.

To name ‘Sappho’ is already to say a mouthful, because the Sapphic worldview is a full-blown, backward reaching, thoroughly sexualized thought-construct. Sappho is, of course, from the Isle of Lesbos, from which we get the term lesbian. (This, is an unbeatable starter for any conversation!) The urbanized definition of ‘Sapphic’ is that it refers to “women who are sexually or romantically attracted to other women. Applies to both lesbians and bisexual women, as it is only the same-sex attraction that matters, not any other attractions the women may have.” So, it goes without saying that any translator working with a poem or fragment associated with the Sappho-poet already “knows” how the language and imagery of the poem ought to be oriented.

Speakers of Aeolian Greek

The historical Sappho wrote lyric poetry, in an Aeolian Greek dialect (in yellow on the map), around erotic themes. The information about dialect is significant because it acts as a GPS localizer—Aeolian Greek was spoken primarily in Central Greece (Boeotia); Thessaly; on the Isle of Lesbos in the Aegean; and in some Greek colonies of Asia Minor.

According to our wiki-source, Sappho’s poetry was known and admired in antiquity, “and she was among the nine lyric poets deemed major by scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria,” which covers the period approximately from the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BC to the consolidation of the Roman Empire after 31 BC. Our source also informs us, importantly, that so extremely little is known for certain about Sappho’s life, that the authors of Lesbian Peoples: Material for a Dictionary even left “an entire page for the entry on Sappho, deliberately… blank.”

According to another source, and attributed to the classicist Judith P. Hallett from her reading of the Greek Anthology, it is claimed that Plato called Sappho “the tenth Muse.” But this association is unverified and tenuous in the highest. Be that as it may, historical evidence certainly indicates that Sappho’s profile was stamped on coins, and that she was paid tribute through civic statuary. Other traditions from antiquity render a more nuanced history of Sappho, which includes mocking her obvious sexual predilection for women; being caricatured by the writers of New Comedy (e.g., Menander); her supposed suicide as a result of spurned love (per Ovid); and Christian moralists who, quite predictably and copiously, moralized and anathematized her.

§ Expanded Poem_HEPHAESTION Gramm. Enchiridion de metris {1402.001} Page 37 line 5 (TLG)—authorship unknown. [Phrontisterion translation].

Selene is now diminished, along with Pleiades;

And (my) mid-night hours;

Youth, as well, is already on the Wing;

I, alone, remain lying here—still.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες· μέσαι δὲ (5)
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα· ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

(#1), Loneliness

Set are the Pleiades; the Moon is down
And midnight dark on high.
The hours, the hours, drift by,
And here I lie,
Alone

(#2), The sinking moon has left the sky,

The Pleiades have also gone.

Midnight comes—and goes, the hours fly

And solitary still, I lie.

(Cox; Fragm. adesp. 976 Page)

Hephaestion the grammarian, who brings this poem to the world, does not provide any formal attribution as to the authorship of this poem that had recommended itself to his grammatical sense by virtue of its metrical form. Also, this poem comes to us with no title. So, because A Girl’s Lament is as orphaned as a text can possibly be, bereft of both a demonstrated, historically defining framing context as well as of authorial intent, that leaves the modern interpreter of this poem in a place of wonderful existential autonomy—to create a new dialectic, a mixing of voices old and voices young. This is one of Heidegger’s most important philo-poetic legacies—that it is precisely in collaboration with such ancient texts that a new dialectical Dwelling can be created for a contemporary world’s renewal of Thinking.

§ Bits and bobs in the world of words. The Greek structure of this poem is quite deliberate and clear, which becomes especially evident in the following color-coding.

Selene is now diminished, along with Pleiades;

And (my) mid-night hours;

Youth, as well, is already on the Wing;

I, alone, remain lying here—still.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες· μέσαι δὲ (5)
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα· ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

[Deduke men a selanna kai plhiades; mesai de (5)

nuktes, para d’erxeth’hora; egw de mona katheudw.]

The μὲν [men] in the first phrase introduces the contrast with everything that follows: the καὶ [kai] that links Selene to Pleiades; the δὲ [de] at the end of (5); the first δὲ [de] in line 6; and the final δὲ [de] after the ἐγὼ [egw] in the final clause. Which yields the following structure: On the one hand, [Selene is now diminished, along with Pleiades], and [mid-night hours], and [life’s wending springtime or Youth on the Wing], and [only me lying here—still], on the other hand.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες· μέσαι δὲ (5)
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα· ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

A second observation about the structure of this poem is the power of the verbs, and especially of the δέδυκε [deduke] that opens the poem. There are three verbs in this short poem: δέδυκε opens the festivities, καθεύδω [katheudw] closes the games, and nestled in-between is the emphatically split παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ [para d’erxeth’]. The verbal strong-man in this cast of characters is δέδυκε (deduke = perfect, active, indicative, 3^rd person singular verb), which casts its shadow to some degree over every noun in the entire poem. Selene (the moon) is now diminished, as is Pleiades, my long mid-night hours, and Youth—all of these nouns are riding on the coat-tails of δέδυκε, which carries with it the sense of suns and moons and stars and seasons ‘setting’. The verb is in the perfect tense, which is used to describe completed action with consequences reaching into the present.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες· μέσαι δὲ (5)
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα· ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

Much of the intensity that emanates from this poem has to do with the dichotomy between action and intimations of inaction, as indicated by the verbs, and which is also clearly linked to the feminine character both of the author and of Nature. Selene (f) and the Pleiades (f) are active players in the natural, rhythmical cycles of the world, in the sense that they are now diminished—they have arrived at the completion of their (re)productive phases. This is equally so with the author’s mid-night hours (f), and with Youth (f)—both also having run their respective courses. The seasonal cycles of nature and aging are happening all around our lamenting girl; but she (f) is the only (μόνα - mona) natural element in the poem that is (has been? is become?) inactive (lying indolent or still on her bed), which seems to imply, of course, that her inactive womb has kept pace with the seasonal decline that surrounds her. Spring, with all of its potential, has come and gone; fall is now afoot; the earth is already preparing for its deep winter sleep.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες· μέσαι δὲ (5)
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα· ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

In terms of scholarship, it is comprehensible that this poem, because of its strongly feminine overtones, has been attached to the Sappho-poet. Now, whether or not this attachment is historically demonstrable or actually relevant, it remains nonetheless unfortunate that the assimilation of this poem into the Sapphic myth tradition will necessarily determine the interpretative orientation of most, if not all of this poem’s translators. That said: the feminine persona of the author is tremendously important to the meaning of the poem; and it is introduced emphatically, unforgettably, by the opening and closing phrases of the poem: δέδυκε σελάννα [deduke selanna]—the moon/Silene (f) has waned, and μόνα καθεύδω [mona katheudw]– I, alone, remain lying here—still.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες· μέσαι δὲ (5)
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα· ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

§ Nature images, and the complexity of literal time verses seasonal and metaphorical time. There is an interesting difficulty structuring this poem, which is how to interpret the aspect of time that permeates, and therefore determines the mood of the poem. In the first version that we referred to (#1), entitled Loneliness, time is embodied literally, through the viewpoint of the author who is lying in bed, sleepless. The space of the poem is conceived of as a person’s long, solitary journey through the tediously ‘drifting hours’ of a sleepless night.

(#1), Loneliness

Set are the Pleiades; the Moon is down
And midnight dark on high.
The hours, the hours, drift by,
And here I lie,
Alone

While a literally rendered space and time of poem (#1) is also shared by the second, untitled version (#2): moon has left, Pleiades have gone, Midnight comes—and goes, this latter version is yet elastic enough to also allow for an insight about time that is more perennial, more universal. So, this latter translation undertones for the reader (by the present tense in line 3) the likelihood that the author’s ‘solitary tonight’ of this particular night, is also a metaphor for all the other ‘solitary tonights’ the author has experienced.

(#2), Untitled

The sinking moon has left the sky,

The Pleiades have also gone.

Midnight comes—and goes, the hours fly

And solitary still, I lie.

(Cox; Fragm. adesp. 976 Page)

In contrast to these two renderings (#1 and #2), however, Phrontisterion’s translation steps away from the literal or temporal ‘space of the poem’, because the language itself of these lines is decidedly not literal, but rather seasonal. The ‘time’ of this poem is not structured around one sleepless or lonely night. Rather, it is built around a period or season of a woman’s life that, she feels, has come or is rapidly coming to a close.

Selene is now diminished, along with Pleiades;

And (my) mid-night hours;

Youth, as well, is already on the Wing;

I, alone, remain lying here—still.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες· μέσαι δὲ (5)
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα· ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

To justify this translation strategy, one has to discover whether the meaning for this poet’s world—of the moonset (=Selene now diminished); and of Pleiades; and of Youth (ὥρα = period, time, season), was in fact about the passage of hours in a day and constellations through the night sky. Or, whether the conceit is in fact broadly seasonal, as opposed to temporal.

Selene at the Louvre

§ The Moon (σελάννα). Line 5. At the end of the day some things are just what they seem to be. And ‘the moon’ in this poem seems to be one of those things. Lunar mythological imagery for ancient Greece is, of course, richissime. Selene, the Moon goddess who, according to the Homeric cycle’s Hymn to Selene, drives “her long-maned horses at full speed, at eventime in the mid-month” across the night heavens, is brother to Helios, the Sun god who drives his chariot across the day sky. It is more than obvious, as well, that the rhythm of Selene’s waxing and waning have made it a symbol for time, change, and repetitive cycles the world over.

§ The Pleiades (πληιάδες). Line 5. This group of stars, colloquially known as the Seven Sisters, has long inspired poets. In the biblical book of Job (38:31-33), for example, which is dated between the 7^th & 4^th centuries BC, God and Job are enjoying an alpha-male moment and, to establish the comparison, God asks Job to assess the extent of his (Job’s) Power with this almost non-sarcastic question:

Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades?

Can you loosen Orion’s belt?

Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons

or lead out the Bear with its cubs?

Do you know the laws of the heavens?

Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?

In his poem about man’s Paradise Lost, John Milton, speaking of God’s creating activity (cf. 340ff), writes:

First in his East the glorious Lamp was seen, [ 370 ]
Regent of Day, and all th' Horizon round
Invested with bright Rayes, jocond to run
His Longitude through Heav'n's high rode: the gray
Dawn, and the Pleiades before him danc'd
Shedding sweet influence: less bright the Moon, [ 375 ]

The Pleiades also have a decidedly mytho-Sapphic presence in astromythology. According to one study, the Sisters’ cluster is even associated with the planet Venus (the love planet!).

In a more natural setting, however, the rising of this sisterly cluster occurs in the southern sky (for Greece) in May, and marked the opening of the navigation season for Greek ships, as its setting in late autumn, around November, brought the sailing season to a close. Even closer to the nature cycles that frame our poem, is the notion found in Hesiod’s Works and Days that the appearance of Pleiades “from the sun indicated the approach of harvest,” and that the setting of the cluster in autumn marked the time for the new sowing.

(ll. 383-404) When the Pleiades, daughters of Atlas, are rising [1310], begin your harvest, and your ploughing when they are going to set [1311]. Forty nights and days they are hidden and appear again as the year moves round, when first you sharpen your sickle. This is the law of the plains, and of those who live near the sea, and who inhabit rich country, the glens and dingles far from the tossing sea,--strip to sow and strip to plough and strip to reap, if you wish to get in all Demeter's fruits in due season, and that each kind may grow in its season.

Hippocrates (ca. 460-370 BC), an important figure in Greek medicine in the day, even being referred to as the “Father of Modern Medicine,” hence the Hippocratic Oath, apparently

made much of the Pleiades, dividing the year into four seasons, all connected with their positions in relation to the sun; his winter beginning with their setting and ending with the spring equinox; spring lasting till their rising; the summer, from their appearing to the rising of Arcturus; and the autumn, till their setting again (link).

And, finally, another source suggests already for the Bronze Age peoples of Europe (ca. 3^rd millennium BC), the ritualized association of the Pleiades “with mourning and funerals. Between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice, the cluster rose in the eastern sky after the sunset.” This source concludes that, “The Pleiades start to shine over the horizon and set in the West, during October-November, the proper time of the year in Mediterranean area, to plough and sow the land.”

So, our poem links together and then resolves two seasonal expressions—the setting of Selene and of Pleiades, as waning cycles of the natural world, into παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα [para d’erxeth’hora]—time is passing me by. Per Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ), the notion of ὥρα [hora] means variously: “any period, fixed by natural laws and revolutions, whether of the year, month, or day.” So, its translation may range from the very literal to the extremely metaphorical, using expressions ranging from: the day; the prime of the season; the springtime of life; and youth. Significant in this context, however, is the notion that all of the natural cycles are winding down and beginning to pass out of reach. First the near: the waning of tonight’s moon, coupled with the remote: the setting of the Seven Sisters, which marks the end of the belle saison. For our poetess, a period or season of her life is now diminished, it has ‘set’.

Selene is now diminished, along with Pleiades;

And (my) mid-night hours;

Youth, as well, is already on the Wing;

I, alone, remain lying here—still.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες· μέσαι δὲ (5)
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα· ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

§ Youth, as well, is already on the Wing. Quite literally, the phrase παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα [para d’erxeth’hora] yields: the hour (time) is passing by. The prepositional verb παρέρχομαι [par+erxomai] (which is to say the joining of the preposition παρa with the verb έρχομαι) means: to go by, beside or past; to pass by, outstrip; to outwit, escape, elude; to pass unnoticed, escape the notice of. In our text, though, παρέρχομαι has been manhandled, rent asunder as it were, by the quasi-trivial postpositive particle δ’, to yield παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’, as if to underscore just how very ‘by’ the passing-by is. In terms of translational value for this phrase, both the sentiment and the expression, ‘Time is fleeting’, are hackneyed in poetic English. While ‘’Youth on the Wing’ at least has the virtue of being distantly reminiscent of the lovely language used to render Omar Khayyam’s metaphor in the Persian poem, The Rubaiyat: “and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.”

§ Bits and wordy bobs in search of an interpretation. So, to encapsulate things in a Hunter S. Thompson kind of way—our poem is far from being merely some lame lines about a desperately feverish gal who is not getting any action, with whomever, on a quiet Saturday night; however, this is certainly the meaning in version #1 of our poem, right down to the title: ‘Loneliness’.

Set are the Pleiades; the Moon is down
And midnight dark on high.
The hours, the hours, drift by,
And here I lie,
Alone

The second version of the poem, #2 Untitled, is not even marginally better with its, “And solitary still, I lie.” Both renderings are studies in triviality, and neither give us the more perennial lyrical truth, the Philo-Poetry, revealed by the word-images and structure of these lines. “A Girl’s Lament” is not some thin poem about unappeased sexual hunger and desperate loneliness. It is, rather, about the natural mood that accompanies the realization that just as (all) life has a springtime and summer, it also has an autumn. And a winter. The fields of Poetry are carpeted with similar expressions and sentiments.

“Sappho” (“A Girl’s Lament”; ca. 7^th century BC; Greece)

Selene is now diminished, along with Pleiades;

And (my) mid-night hours;

Youth, as well, is already on the Wing;

I, alone, remain lying here—still.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες· μέσαι δὲ (5)
νύκτες, παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα· ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

Omar Khayyam (Rubaiyat; 1120; Iran)

(VII) Come, fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring

The Winter Garment of Repentance fling:

The Bird of Time has but a little way

To fly - and Lo! the Bird is on the Wing.

Dante Alighiere (Inferno, Canto I; 14^th century; Italy)—

Midway upon the journey of our life

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost.

Ah me! how hard a thing it is to say

What was this forest savage, rough, and stern,

Which in the very thought renews the fear.

So bitter is it, death is little more;

A sonnet from Percy Bysshe Shelly (Ozymandias, 1818; England)

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Alfred Lord Tennyson (Ulysses; 1833; England)

I am a part of all that I have met;

Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'

Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades

For ever and forever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,

To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!

As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life

Were all too little, and of one to me

Little remains: but every hour is saved

From that eternal silence, something more,

A bringer of new things; and vile it were

For some three suns to store and hoard myself,

And this gray spirit yearning in desire

To follow knowledge like a sinking star,

Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.

§ Inspiration for a funeral inscription? “Sappho’s” poem, “A Girl’s Lament,” is, essentially, a nature poem with Stoic overtones, which is to say that the author measures the Springtime and Summer of her life against the ever-present recognition of her decline into Autumn and Winter. The subject of the poem is certainly “erotic,” in an ancient Greek sort of way, because without necessarily being strictly-speaking sexual, Nature herself and all of her patterns and participants are yet fundamentally tuned to the greater Eros that infuses reality.

To further inform our reading and thinking about “A Girl’s Lament,” the ‘literature’ also provides cases of inspirational funeral inscriptions written in the first person. One source (cf. Day, 26) proposes, for example, an inscription found in the Carmina epigraphica graeca saeculorum (24; base with kore, Merenda in Attica, c. 540-530), where one reads:

“(I am or this is the) marker of Phrasikleia. I shall always be called a maiden, having received this name instead of marriage as my lot from the gods.”

« σεμα Φρασικλείας·
κόρε κεκλέσομαι
αἰεί ἀντὶ γάμο
παρὰ θεον τοῦτο
λαχοσ᾿ ὄνομα »

On the subject of the first-person quality of the funeral text, which corresponds with the first-person voice of “A Girl’s Lament,” the author concludes that, “All praising epitaphs are in a sense mimetic; whoever reads one aloud plays the role of a praise poet. Some, however, emphasize this mimetic quality with first-person forms. In the simplest, the tomb or marker is the complement of εἰμί or referent of μέ, but in others first- person verbs help create an echo of funerary song.”

This may well turn out also to be relevant to a future interpretation of “A Girl’s Lament.”

Selene is now diminished, along with Pleiades;

And (my) mid-night hours;

Youth, as well, is already on the Wing;

I, alone, remain lying here—still.

δέδυκε μὲν ἁ σελάννα καὶ πληιάδες·

μέσαι δὲ νύκτες,

παρὰ δ’ ἔρχεθ’ ὥρα·

ἐγὼ δὲ μόνα καθεύδω.

Sources (Sappho):

*This title, “The Deserted Lover: A Girl’s Lament,” is found in Athenaze, An Introduction to Ancient Greek, Book I (Balme and Lawall, Oxford, 2003, p. 131), but there attributed to D.A. Campbell, Greek Lyric Poetry, p. 52.

Hallett, Judith P. 1979. "Sappho and her Social Context: Sense and Sensuality." Signs. 4 (3).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho

http://www.uh.edu/~cldue/texts/sappho.html

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Sappho%20Translations.htm

http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/usappho/sph49.htm

Sources (Pleiades):

http://www.constellationsofwords.com/stars/pleiades.html

https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0810/0810.1592.pdf

http://www.ancient.eu/article/833/

http://www.theorionzone.com/Pleiades.pdf

http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/greek-texts/ancient-greece/hesiod/works-days.asp?pg=13

Sources (Selene)