[It was summer when I found you]

[It was summer when I found you]
By Sappho

It was summer when I found you
In the meadow long ago,
And the golden vetch was growing
By the shore.

Did we falter when love took us
With a gust of great desire?
Does the barely bid the wind wait
In his course?


About the Poem

Sappho’s poem [It was summer when I found you] is a delicate fragment of longing, desire, and memory. Though much of her poetry has been lost to time, the pieces that remain still shimmer with emotional clarity and sensuality — and this little lyric is no exception.

The poem opens in the languor of summer, with the speaker discovering her beloved in a meadow by the shore. Nature itself seems alive with desire: the “golden vetch” blooming wildly and the sea just beyond. Sappho often entwines the natural world with human passion — here, love is as irresistible and inevitable as the gust of wind that bends the barley.

The second stanza asks a rhetorical question: Did we falter when love took us? The answer is implied — how could they? Just as barley cannot resist the wind, the lovers could not resist their “gust of great desire.” There’s a quiet defiance and acceptance in this image: love comes, fierce and unbidden, and the only possible response is to bend with it, to be swept up.

What makes this fragment so moving is how it acknowledges both the beauty and the powerlessness of love. It’s not simply a tender memory, but also a reflection on the force of desire that overtakes reason, propriety, and even hesitation. Sappho’s verses, like this summer meadow fragment, remind us that love and desire are as old and natural as wind through barley or waves on the shore — irresistible, ephemeral, and profoundly human.


Sappho and the Isle of Lesbos

Sappho was a lyric poet who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos around 600 BCE. Little is known about her life in detail, but her reputation as one of the greatest poets of antiquity endured even as most of her work was lost. She ran a kind of school or circle for young women, where they learned poetry, music, and perhaps prepared for marriage.

Her surviving poetry — preserved only in fragments — often speaks of intense affection, admiration, and desire for women. This has led her to be celebrated as an early voice of female same-sex love and to become a symbol of lesbian identity in modern times.

Lesbos itself, situated in the northeastern Aegean, was a center of culture, art, and education in the Archaic Greek world. Because of Sappho’s association with the island and her poetry about love between women, the term lesbian came to refer to women who love women. Similarly, the word sapphic — derived from her name — describes romantic or erotic relationships between women.


Why We Call Gay Women “Lesbians”

Centuries after her death, during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when sexology and psychology were developing modern categories for sexuality, the name of her home — Lesbos — became shorthand for women who love women. The term lesbian originally referred simply to something from Lesbos, but gradually it became associated with female homosexuality, particularly in English by the early 20th century.

In this way, Sappho’s poetry and her island home gave language and dignity to generations of women who loved other women, helping to articulate their desires in a world that often tried to silence them.


Lesbos and the Olisbos

In ancient Greek comedy and satire, the island of Lesbos — and especially its city of Mitylene — was sometimes joked about as a place where women crafted and used olisboi, leather phallic implements we would now call dildos. These bawdy associations appear in vase paintings, lexicons, and plays, reflecting both curiosity and discomfort with women’s same-sex desire. While likely exaggerated, such references add another layer to the island’s long-standing connection to female sexuality.