Sapphic stanza

Originally composed in quantitative verse and unrhymed, since the Middle Ages imitations of the form typically feature rhyme and accentual prosody.

[1][2] Alcaeus of Mytilene composed in, and may have invented, the Sapphic stanza,[1] but it is his contemporary and compatriot Sappho whose example exerted the greatest influence, and for whom the verseform is now named.

Her poems in this meter (collected in Book I of the ancient edition) ran to 330 stanzas, a significant part of her complete works, and of her surviving poetry: fragments 1-42.

Transliteration and formal equivalent paraphrase (substituting English stress for Greek length): phaínetaí moi kênos ísos théoisin émmen᾽ ṓnēr, óttis enántiós toi isdánei kaì plásion âdu phōneí- sas upakoúei.

[9] Gasparov provides this double scansion of Ode 1.22 (lines 1-4), which also displays Horace's typical long fourth syllables and caesura after the fifth: This can be translated as: Other ancient poets who used the Sapphic stanza are Statius (in Silvae 4.7), Prudentius, Ausonius, Paulinus of Nola and Venantius Fortunatus (once in Carmina 10.7).

Many Latin hymns were written in Sapphic stanzas, including the famous hymn for John the Baptist which gave the original names of the sol-fa scale: Ut queant laxīs | resonāre fibrīs Mīra gestōrum | famulī tuōrum Solve pollūtī | labiī reātum Sāncte Ioannēs Accentual Sapphic stanzas that ignore Classical Latin vowel quantities are also attested, as in the 11th-century Carmen Campidoctoris, which stresses the 1st, 4th and 10th syllables of the lines while keeping the Horatian caesura after the fifth (here with a formal equivalent paraphrase): Talibus armis | ornatus et equo —Paris uel Hector | meliores illo nunquam fuere | in Troiano bello, sunt neque modo—[12] Furnished with all these munitions and stallion, Paris nor Hector, nor anyone ever, Better than he was, bore their arms at Illium...

)[16] Allen Ginsberg also experimented with the form: Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet mouthed under Boulder coverlets winter springtime hug me naked laughing & telling girl friends gossip til autumn[17] The Oxford classicist Armand D'Angour has created mnemonics to illustrate the difference between Sapphics heard as a four-beat line (as in Kipling) versus the three-beat measure, as follows: Sapphics A (4 beats per line): Cőnquering Sáppho's nőt an easy búsiness: Masculine ladies cherish independence.

[21] In 1653, Paul Gerhardt used the Sapphic strophe format in the text of his sacred morning song "Lobet den Herren alle, die ihn ehren".

In the 18th century, amidst a resurgence of interest in Classical versification, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock wrote unrhymed Sapphics, regularly moving the position of the dactyl.

[1] Miquel Costa i Llobera wrote Catalan Sapphics in the late 19th century, in his book of poems in the manner of Horace, called Horacianes.