Fragment 40, tr. J. Addington Symonds (1883)
Lo, Love once more, the limb-dissolving King,The bitter-sweet impracticable thing,Wild-beast-like rends me with fierce quivering.
About this text
Fragment 40, tr. J. Addington Symonds (1883) is in the public domain. This text is taken from Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation (ed. Henry Thornton Wharton, John Lane, 1908, fifth edition), Project Gutenberg ebook #57390, the Various (ed. H. T. Wharton) translation; the transcription's header, footer and licence were removed and nothing else was changed. You may copy, print and reuse it freely.
Cite as: Sappho, Fragment 40, tr. J. Addington Symonds (1883), in Sappho: Selected Renderings (1908), text of Project Gutenberg ebook #57390, Laurel, https://laurelpoetry.com/poem/sappho-wharton/fr-40.html, id L29181.
Form and metre
Fragment 40, tr. J. Addington Symonds (1883) is 3 lines in a single stanza. This poem did not settle on a metre of its own; the book it comes from is in iambic tetrameter.
See other poems in iambic tetrameter.
Measured by Laurel's pipeline, not copied from a handbook: how stress and metre are counted, how rhyme is lettered, how a drifted rhyme is found. Where the dictionary cannot confirm a rhyme the letter is withheld, not guessed.
Rhyme words, stanza by stanza
The word that ends each line, lettered by the rhyme it makes; a dash is a line whose rhyme the dictionary could not confirm.
- 1 AAA kingA · thingA · quiveringA
Scansion, line by line
Each line with its syllable count and the stresses the words themselves fix: / stressed, ˘ unstressed, · a syllable the word leaves free and the metre decides. Read against iambic tetrameter. How this is done.
| Line | Syl. | Stress |
|---|---|---|
| Lo, Love once more, the limb-dissolving King, | 10 | ······˘/˘· |
| The bitter-sweet impracticable thing, | 8 | ·/˘·˘/˘· |
| Wild-beast-like rends me with fierce quivering. | 9 | ·······/˘ |
The reader shows the same poem with its rhymes coloured and a stress row above each line, the notes beside their stanzas, and any word's definition on a tap; the analysis page takes the whole book apart. How every part of this site was made.