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Essay / The adaptation of sapphic aesthetics and themes in Verlaine's "Ballade Sappho" millennia and a half after his time. The blending of gender aspects and themes of male power and female desire in "To Anaktoria" and "Seizure" almost foreshadowed the radical combinations of worldly imagery and metaphysical meaning in the decadent works – particularly Verlaine's explicit homage , “Sappho Ballad”. Additionally, Sappho's position as a classic lesbian poet made her an appealing progenitor of a genre so concerned with overturning social mores and finding unique ways to express a modern form of desire. "Sappho Ballad" heavily incorporated female homosexual love into its expression of male heterosexual love through its unique use of the language of lesbianism, a sexual orientation that decadents considered particularly attractive for its perceived purity and outsider position. the commonly accepted morality of society. no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get Original Essay Sappho's lyrical poem “To Anaktoria” exhibits many literary qualities that would define decadent poetry. The work begins with a series of military images of a masculine character: “cavalry”, “infantry”, “fleet of long oars”, “supreme view”, “black earth”. Thematically, this stanza almost resembles an epic poem, and the romantic quality of the poem is briefly toned down. This deceptive appearance is reflected in several of Decadent's works. Baudelaire, of the early decadence, deliberately masked dark themes and abrupt, depressing climaxes with inoffensive, gentle openings, to great effect. For example, “A Carcass” begins with “Remember, my love, the object we saw / That beautiful June morning,” then turns into a long, explicit and almost startling rumination on a decomposing corpse. Baudelaire's poem begins gently and ends horribly; “To Anaktoria” works in reverse, beginning with war imagery and evolving into a personal romantic message. As well as being an expression of Sappho's desire, the poem contains an implicit theme of anticipating the triumph of love over war. Military imagery is used as an artifice to construct a strong declaration of love. This is comparable to many decadent poems which use the language of military or imperial force without expressing a military or historical narrative; for example, Verlaine's “Langueur,” a contemplation of art and boredom that places the speaker as “the Empire at the end of decadence.” The fact that Sappho also fashioned love poems from the language of masculinity and history indicates her concern with love above all else. The ultimate message of "To Anaktoria" is Sappho's willingness to forgo the concreteness of "dazzling chariots and armored hoplites" for the less tangible "soft steps" and "radiant countenance" of Anaktoria. Decadent literature, at its core, was also a rejection of realism and an escape to the intangible and the luxury of art – for example, Verlaine's “lazy acrostics.” “Seizure” runs through a series of unsettling physical metaphors. “A thin fire runs like a thief” through her body, and she is “paler than grass.” She becomes “intimate with death,” but she cannot die and must “suffer everything.” This convolution of metaphors is similar to the “jungle of symbols” of the Symbolists. The deep despair expressed in the final lines shares an emotion with the fascination ofsymbolists for death and other realms, as well as for the immortality of the poet. The ending of “Seizure” even seems to imply that Sappho must live through her poetry. Throughout “Seizure,” Sappho maintains her control over language even as she appears to succumb to physical torment. Despite the brevity of the poem, it unfolds at a frenetic and powerful pace; as the Decadents would later be concerned with sensation, Sappho would express it here. Just like the decadent poets, Sappho also used allusions to express herself. She refers to the Iliad, but focuses on detailing the deleterious nature of Helen's love for a man in order to describe Anaktoria's own love, presumably also for a man. Interestingly, Sappho also seems to confuse Anaktoria with Anaktoria's love interest. First, it's the one Anaktoria likes that contrasts with the "supreme view" of an army. Yet the poem's conclusion pits a "dazzling" force against Anaktoria herself. Sappho works her way through the poem to the expected conclusion of her love for Anaktoria, but gets there by beginning with Anaktoria's beloved. A similar thing happens in “Seizure.” “This man is equal to a god” solely because of his proximity and effect on Sappho's beloved. Although Sappho still explicitly expresses female homosexuality, she uses the powerful norm of heterosexuality to achieve this. Essentially, heterosexual desire stands in the way of her lesbian desire, and she uses this as a jumping-off point to create both serious conflict and a sense of understanding in her lyric poems as she looks through the window of love woman-man. The empathy implied by Sappho calling Anaktoria's heterosexual love "the supreme spectacle" in a love poem addressed to Anaktoria herself is comparable to decadent poets expressing heterosexual love through homosexual premises – for example, the “Ballade Sappho” by Verlaine. Verlaine and other decadent poets harbored a contempt for social mores and sympathized with the alienation of society due to one's deviant artistic expression. Lesbians are forced to turn their backs on society and their form of exile is particularly fascinating. Sappho in particular was both a lesbian writer and a poetic innovator. She expressed the misery of unrequited desire and social ostracism through her art. His desires were difficult to achieve due to classical morality; consequently, his writing took on a sort of furtive quality, as evidenced by the apparent entanglement of heterosexual and homosexual desires in some of his stories, despite his obvious desire for another woman. Moreover, the erotic aspect of lesbian alienation was a serious point of interest for decadent poets. Lesbians were seen as having sex solely for pleasure, a concept that both threatened Christian morality and conventional male sexuality that decadents disliked and, at the same time, reflected the decadent credo of art for the sake of art. Therefore, Sapphic love was the purest form of love and desire that decadent writers were obsessed with. Additionally, lesbians were immune to male attraction. The decadent lesbian writer Renée Vivien said that Sappho's songs enchanted "mermaids themselves" and that, symbolically, lesbians were "eternally under the spell of the past", that is, of Sapphic writings. The idea of this sort of lesbian immunity inspired a masochistic impulse among decadent writers, prompting them to find pleasure in denial. Verlaine’s “Ballade Sappho” illustrates this impulse. “Sappho Ballad” is alove poem imagining the eroticism between the speaker and the addressed beloved. As in “To Anaktoria”, masculine language appears as a point of contrast. Indeed, there is a sort of androgynous aspect to the speaker. His hand is “gentle” and “that of a mistress,” but he resembles an animal whose “wild head” “wanders and digs.” His body is that of an “athlete” and “victory and defeat” are experienced “in a battle fought by the heart and the head”. Yet the speaker insists that he is “like the great Sappho.” There is a servile aspect to this. The speaker only desires to please his beloved. She is constantly complemented throughout the poem: her skin is a “festival,” her body is “splendor,” she has a “secret glory” full of “flavors.” He experiences pleasure on a basic level – that is, pleasure for pleasure's sake. His pleasure is only pleasure: “What pleasure in your pleasure. » His hand was “destined to serve her”. He wants to free her, even artistically: "Let the soul of your poet wander / Where it wants, fields, woods, hills / As you want and as I want so much." Verlaine essentially attempts to express his sincere desire to physically please a woman through the language of Sappho, whose lesbian love he considered the most truthful and equal to his own love. Throughout In the poem, Verlaine insists that he is "like the great Sappho": that is, he can please a woman with the purity of lesbian love, and that he can liberate a woman's artistic soul through the "skillful strokes of her new art." The poem subtly contradicts this point with its references to masculinity. While Sappho used masculine language to draw a contrast between the ideal love of a woman and the more tangible love of a man, Verlaine seems to use it almost to remind the reader of his own masculinity and insist that 'a man can love a woman the same way a woman can love a woman. The sensuality of “Sappho Ballad” is particularly tactile. His hand “slips” and is “destined to serve” her with “skillful blows”; “the wild head” is sent to “wander and dig” “among the flavors” of its “secret glory”; finally, his body is “hard and soft again” during the “fight”. The poem moves to the frenetic pace and emotion of “Seizure,” arousing strong emotions through its rapid, explicit language and powerful erotic metaphors. Another way to read this is to note the speaker's apparent androgyny, and how the decidedly masculine language used to describe the speaker mixes with comparisons between the speaker and Sappho and the speaker's explicit desire to physically serve a woman as would a woman. The androgyny of Verlaine's speaker in "Sappho Ballad" is similar to the playful bisexuality expressed in several of Sappho's poems, notably "To Anaktoria" and "Seizure", which begins with the misleading phrase: "For me, this man is equal to a god. ". Of particular note is Verlaine's phrase: "To send it with the skillful strokes of a new art." The heavy, decadent sensuality of this poem is the art he mentions here, and he considers his own art – as well as his aesthetic of pleasure – as this “new art” which arouses rapture. The idea that art itself could or should provoke such physical pleasure is a strong decadent ideal, which contributed to. the decadents' admiration for Sappho herself was an artist of a new form who tried to express sensuality, desire and the pain caused by both through her poetry. of that of the Decadents His own skillful traits are evoked throughout Verlaine's poem, just as his own desire is used as a point of comparison with desire...
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