Gwen Harwood’s critically acclaimed composition “Burning Sappho” was penned under the pseudonym Miriam Stone in 1962. The necessity to write down a poem under a different name evidences her fears and preoccupation. The poem is an insight into a typical day in a woman’s life who is bound to perform her duties as a mother, wife and perfect homemaker at the cost of her dreams and aspirations. She is devoid of the little ‘me-time’ that every individual deserves and ironically craves after juggling with the day’s burdens. Her failed attempts to find that time in between her chores to write down a poem leave her frustrated and cynical. Thus, Harwood’s allusion to the Greek lyric poet Sappho ( much acclaimed for her female homoerotic poetry ) through the borrowing of her title from the Romantic poet Lord Byron’s epic poem “Don Juan” clearly suggests her inclination towards paving a way for an unobstructed flow of passionate and creative energy in a woman which often suppresses under the dire dictums of the patriarchal worldview. 

Gwen Harwood was an Australian poet known for her active participation in women’s rights during the wave of feminism that struck Australia in the mid-20th century. Since women were deemed to occupy the domestic sphere and lacked encouragement from society to pursue any professional career, Harwood attempted to bring forth the struggles of such women by centering her creations, especially verses, on a woman’s conventional roles as a mother and a wife suffocating her in the chains of domestic entrapment.

Burning Sappho | Summary and Analysis

The poem caters to a day in the life of the first-person woman speaker who struggles to find time to pursue her passion for writing. Domestic and societal engagements create obstacles in her path that force her to develop a sinister attitude towards them. The chaining consequences of marriage and motherhood surface in the poem in its dark and mysterious tones. Readers can locate the temporal shift throughout the poem from day to night and to the early hours of the morning. The first and the last stanza are composed in the iambic tetrameter and all four stanzas follow a consistent rhyme scheme of abacbcdd. 

Burning Sappho | Analysis, Lines 1-8

The clothes are washed, the house is clean.  

I find my pen and start to write.  

 Something like anger forks between  

My child and me. She kicks her good  

 New well-selected toys with spite  

Around the room, and whines for food.  

Inside my smile a monster grins  

And sticks her image through with pins.  

The poem opens in a statement-like fashion denoting the completion of certain domestic tasks a woman has to perform ritualistically. The speaker believes the end to these chores to be the beginning of her role as a writer. She desires to write- an act of agency and obtaining power usually withheld by men. But her wishes are put to a halt as her child, owing to her nature, throws tantrums demanding food. Contrasting her motherly instincts, the speaker feels a vague emotion equivalent to anger. Negative verbs such as “kick,” “spite” and “whines” are associated with the innocent child to depict the speaker’s frustration with her. The compulsion to act in a pleasing manner compels her to hide her monstrous grins under the garb of a smile. The wickedness of thoughts as she pins her little girl’s image like a Voodoo practice posits the speaker’s exhausted and disturbed mindset. It is noticeable that this stanza begins with a stable rhythmic pattern but digresses later as a reflection of similar feelings of frustration.  

Burning Sappho | Analysis, Lines 9-16

The child is fed, and sleeps. The dishes  

Are washed, the clothes are ironed and aired.  

I take my pen. A kind friend wishes  

To gossip while she knits her socks.  

Scandal and pregnancies are shared.   

The child wakes, and the Rector knocks.  

Invisible inside their placid   

Hostess, a fiend pours prussic acid.  

Again, the speaker check lists her chores which also include feeding up the baby, which lacks emotionality towards her at this stage. She makes another attempt to write but her friend intervenes under the pretext of gossip. The triviality of womenfolk’s pastimes as knitting or gossiping obtains a satirical tone at the end of the speaker. She believes women to be capable of more potential achievements, especially in intellectual realms, than these stereotypical activities. One cannot achieve anything substantial out of communications revolving around “scandal and pregnancies.” However, this scenario also, in some ways, promotes the only means of women’s solidarity and friendships in a patriarchal society. Meanwhile, more distractions such as the child awakening and a simultaneous knock by a member of clergy await her. Once more, she displays a calm composure toward the respectable man that guards her resentment towards him as observed in the alliteration “invisible inside.” These interferences lead her to develop evil plans of ending them once and for all by “pouring prussic acid” (alliteration) as a beverage to be served. Good and evil both reside in a human and it is situational limitations that spark either of them to unveil. 

Burning Sappho | Analysis, Lines 17-24

Night now. Orion first begins  

To show. Day’s trivial angers cease.  

All is required, until one wins,  

At last, this hour. I start to write.  

My husband calls me, rich in peace,  

To bed. Now deathless verse, goodnight.  

In my warm thighs a fleshless devil – 

Chops him to bits with hell-cold evil

The alliteration “night now’ and the celestial imagery of the Orion marks the end of the troublesome day for the speaker. The peaceful night calms her anger as she affirms it to be the right time to resume her writing. But the streak of interference continues as her husband calls her to bed for the sexual act. The phrase “rich in peace” polarises the situation of the couple. While the husband comes across as a man living in peace, the speaker i.e. his wife craves for it. The speaker bids adieu to her “deathless verse” to fulfil the insatiable lust of her husband. Bowing down to her wifely duties does not put a stop to her writing venture. The last two lines connote her lifelessness and involuntariness in the love act. The “hell-cold evil” metaphorically refers to her passivity in the conjugal affair. Another interpretation of the lines points toward the speaker’s fancy of killing her husband through her sexual weapon which he aims to otherwise conquer. 

Burning Sappho | Analysis, Lines 25-32

AM’s quiet at last: the world, the flesh 

The devils burning in my brain. 

Some air of morning stirs afresh  

My shaping element. The mind  

With images of love and pain   

Grapples down gulfs of sleep. I’ll find  

My truth, my poem, and grasp it yet.  

“The moon is gone, the Pleiads set .  

It is early morning- a new day and hence, a new beginning. The speaker is burning with creative energy that requires a platform for expression in order to cool down. The freshness of air charges her mind which deceives her sleep to enable her to write. The mind is recollecting memories constituting various emotions. The poem’s titular Sappho was famous for her love-centric lyrical verses and the speaker like the Greek poetess desires to achieve similar recognition. She is insisting on not losing this opportunity to carve out an alternate identity for herself and “grasp” it as soon as possible. The last line set in quotations signals, at last, the beginning of her creation which the “Pleiads” as a cluster of stars symbolise too.