The last book of the Alexandrian edition of Sappho was made of her wedding songs, and the ancients kept quoting them long after the rest had crumbled: of the twelve fragments gathered here, six survive only because the metrician Hephaestion wanted a one-line example of some verse form. These are the most public poems Sappho wrote. The love lyrics speak with one voice to one person; the epithalamia were performance pieces — sung by choruses of girls at the door of the bridal chamber, traded as banter between the bride’s friends and the groom’s, shouted over the feast. What survives of them is the wreckage of a whole evening’s liturgy, and this work prints the wreckage in its conventional order, each piece under its standard Lobel-Page / Voigt number with the ancient author who preserved it noted in the source.

The sequence runs from dusk to acclamation. Fragment 104, the address to the evening star that brings the sheep, the goat, the child home to her mother — and, unspoken, the bride to the bridegroom — is the hinge of the whole genre, and Byron’s "O Hesperus, thou bringest all good things" keeps it circulating. Fragment 105 holds the two most famous similes she made for the bride: the sweet apple reddening out of reach at the top of the branch (not forgotten — unreachable), and, its dark twin, the hyacinth the shepherds trample on the hills. Fragments 107, 109, and 114 belong to the songs of leave-taking — the bride asking whether she still wants her maidenhood, the father’s one-line answer of betrothal, and the little dialogue in which Maidenhood herself answers from the far side of the door: never again. Around them stand the joking pieces: the doorkeeper with seven-fathom feet and sandals of five oxhides (110), the teasing comparisons and congratulations for the groom (112, 113, 115), and fragment 111, the carpenters’ shout — raise high the roof-beam, the bridegroom comes in the equal of Ares — which J. D. Salinger lifted for a title and which is still the best-known piece of mock-epic in Greek. The closing greetings (116, 117), preserved by Servius and Hephaestion, are the form at its barest: joy to the bride, joy to the bridegroom — the word is chaire, at once "rejoice" and "farewell."

The Greek text is that of Edwin Marion Cox, The Poems of Sappho (1924), a public-domain edition; its readings are kept as printed, and its occasional print artifacts (a dropped letter in the word for "bridegroom" in several fragments) are translated by sense and logged in the translator’s notes. Editorial restorations stay inside [square brackets]; where the text breaks off, the translation breaks off.