The first marvel is the fragment’s completeness. What we have of Sappho has often survived because ancient critics and philologists quoted her, so that we have a word here and a line there. (This has a musical quality of its own: Hugh Kenner called it “the poesis of loss”, and Anne Carson evoked these beguiling gaps in her 2003 edition of Sappho: If Not, Winter.) This poem comes with nine lines of another one, which would have been exciting enough on their own – they show Sappho using words typical of her other poems such as longing and desire, and addressing Aphrodite.