Her risks are substantial: she risks death (her own and others) she risks the irrevocable loss of the familiar and familial she risks becoming a reviled foreigner, trailing war and havoc.

The most beautiful woman, the object of men's desire, became the subject of desire in leaving her husband to follow her heart.' Helen accepts the will of the god as her own, a commitment both anguishing and 'limb-loosening,' dreadful and ecstatic. In her introduction to Sappho's Lyre: Archaic Lyric and Women Poets of Ancient Greece, Diane Rayor notes that 'Sappho's poem does not judge or blame Helen for the consequences of her decision….Who is to blame for the destruction in the Trojan War, the woman who followed her desire for one man or the men who followed their desire for war? Sappho accepts Homer's position in the Iliad, that Helen should not be blamed for the war, but emphasizes Helen's choice and desire in the matter.

And yet, crucially, she is left with a decision: Helen must embrace her love and its effects. In the grip of Aphrodite, Helen finds herself at the mercy of an overwhelming force. Love consumes, loosens and reduces, casting all things on the 'dark earth' in its light. Beyond rationality and intention, love arrives bearing an inexorable mandate. What is love according to Sappho? It is something that seizes, shakes, and crashes. Say foot-soldiers, still others, a fleet,īittersweet and inescapable, crawling thing,

To start, here are three poems by Sappho on love: Reading Mary's essay, I was intrigued by passages from the writings of fifteenth-century anchorite Julian of Norwich, who says that 'Love and dread are brothers' and that there is a form of dread ''born of reverence,' the holy dread with which we face that which we love most, or that which loves us most.' In bringing dread, love, and poetry together, Mary touches on an important relationship, one I'd like consider further by looking at a different set of materials than those Mary has explored.

She considers the poet's fear that 'one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility….something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous and thereby unintentionally cruel' as well as the fear of pain and torture, the difference between emotions and feelings, and negative capability, among other things. My former teacher, the poet Mary Ruefle, has an essay in the June 2012 issue of Poetry on the relationship between dread/fear and poetry.

The impossibility of love