The most imitated love poem in the West opens on a man — and then forgets him. He sits close to the woman, listens to her laugh, and stays godlike, composed. He is a foil, never named again. The poem is about what happens to the speaker's own body when she merely looks at the woman: it comes apart, symptom by symptom, in a cascade so precise that the physician in you will recognise every step. Walk the poem below and watch the body light up.
We have this poem for one reason: around the first century CE, the critic we call Longinus quoted it in On the Sublime as his single best example of synathroismos — the art of selecting the most violent symptoms of a passion and forging them into one whole. He marvelled that Sappho "at once freezes and burns, is out of her mind and in her senses, is terrified and all but dead" — not one emotion, but a whole concourse. Without his admiration the poem would be gone. And even so it is incomplete: four stanzas and the first breath of a fifth survive, breaking off at ἀλλὰ πὰν τόλματον — "but all must be dared" — mid-thought, forever. Its longest shadow is Catullus 51, who remade it in Latin, renamed the beloved Lesbia, and then flinched, tacking on a stanza scolding himself for otium, idleness — as if the only safe response to this much feeling were to moralise it away. Sappho does not flinch. She just reports the body, and lets the report be the poem.
Real: the Greek is the surviving text (public domain, via Longinus); the nine symptoms and their order are the poem's own; the Sapphic-stanza meter, Longinus's framing, the incompleteness, and Catullus 51 are all documented. ⚑ The common misreading — that this is jealousy of the "godlike man" — is corrected here: the man is a foil, dropped after line 1; the poem is the speaker's erotic response to the woman.
A lens, flagged as a lens: the "modern reading" overlay maps the symptoms to a sympathetic / adrenergic fight-or-flight cascade (tachycardia, vasomotor flush, tinnitus, tunnel vision, cold sweat, tremor, pallor). That is a genuinely tight fit — but it is a contemporary lens, not what Sappho meant or knew: she named symptoms; medicine names systems. What the poem is even "about" (desire, a wedding song, a panic response) is honestly still debated. The English is my own plain gloss — no copyrighted translation reproduced.